Electronic Book Review - roubaudhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/roubaud
enHYPER-LEX: A Technographical Dictionaryhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/lexical
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<div class="markup">by</div>
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<div class="field-item even">Paul Harris</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The spirit or at least pervasive desire of our age revolves around a sort of transparency: a desire to project ourselves as a surface of permeable traces, to exfoliate, let the inside become the outside, to become fully visible like the meat and bones of a Cronenberg character, while remaining invisible like the little hacker ghost (Turing’s Demon?) that tracks text in the Random Access Memory banks of the machine onto whose screen we splash words. In large part, the attractive force that transparency exerts is an effect of media culture; simultaneously, however, transparency marks a limit of im-mediacy - an unmediated, collapsed sensation where we can see the neurophysiology of our brains or the shapes of and linkages among our words. This is an immediacy of the sensory that never shades into the tactile - it is rather the immediacy of sensing the medium itself, of clicking tracks around the computer screen or dredging up hidden treasures on the Netscape of our lives.</p>
<p>This transparency is embodied - enacted in a disembodying way - most clearly in the VR-user. Jacked in to an interface that both joins and separates mind and body, the VR-user gets to enter a proprioceptive universe both contingent on their movements and exhiliratingly alien. The body takes on a prosthetic virtual life of its own, a life then seen by a disembodied spectator’s viewpoint; and from this situated spot, the projected body image reveals the visual inside of the embodiedness of living biological infrastructure. From the outside, the VR-user lives an uncanny relation to the body-image; it becomes a double, but with the further twist that this doubling relation itself finds objectified form. The VR-user doesn’t so much experience the body as other as the very process of othering. Wim Wenders gives an imaginative twist to this mode of transparency in <span class="filmtitle">Until the End of the World</span>, where a technology that records the neurophysiological impression of seeing, used by one character to let his blind mother see her children and the world, ends up being utilized as a way to record and then watch one’s own dreams. Characters quickly become walking zombies, narcissistically ensnared in the mirror of their dreams, addicted to the content of the unconscious encoded as visual information.</p>
<p>In order to develop a critical ecology of the culture of transparency, we may turn to Gregory Bateson’s writings. At the end of his life, Bateson posed a question whose answer is now beginning to take its amorphous shape: “Onto what surface shall a theory of aesthetics and consciousness be mapped?” The answer on the cutting edge, the leading surface at this juncture, would appear to be the network. While the key terms of Bateson’s question may seem nearly nostalgic (aesthetics as nostalgia for high art, consciousness as nostalgia for “presence”), there is a distinctly aesthetic pleasure apparent in the joy that network users find in their work. The aesthetics of the network are crystallized in the features of hypertext - the network as a set of links among lexia, or textual units. The network ultimately provides an image of consciousness, because consciousness is now perceived as essentially digital in nature, as a flow of discontinuous signals that result in daunting numbers. But “network” is a promiscuous and ubiquitous term, serving many functions in describing our modes of conduct and perception of the world: network serves as a structural design principle, modus operandi, technological environment and constraint, as a textual space and psychological model all in one. We think of social relations as networks, as well as television corporations and business ties; other more mundane, literal coinages also persist in daily parlance.</p>
<p>But once transparency appears on the screen or the net, once transparency is projected onto a network, it becomes curiously opaque. If we become transparent to ourselves in some warped Baudrillardian sense, then it quickly becomes apparent that we are nodes in the network, that the network as such will remain an unknowable system - an invisible territory, maps of which we continually redraw by surfing the net, but a territory which will remain several dimensions beyond our ken. The opacity of the network persists in more visceral ways than its merely implicit invisibility - it comes home to us when we experience the alternating ecstasy and frustration of reading hypertexts, writing with new softwares, or exploring the web. The limitations of speed, the crashing of lines or programs, or just the cutting edge that a skipping CD sears through the eardrums all point to an irreducible bluntness, a resistance of the medium, that we like to overlook when our jack-in glasses fit snugly or when we theorize transparency in sweeping terms. Technophiles will be quick to point out though that these sort of ups and downs are not in the network or tool at hand, but are a function of how we experience networks. This mode of experience is often described with metaphors that attempt to identify network-surfing with writing or graphic practice, but it might better be called the scene of clicking. And users could be thought of as bit-players, in that they are playing at manipulating bits of information, feeling free, but are in fact tiny nodes whose choices are prefabricated. The bit-player, in essence a signal skimming along over the surface of the net or the screen-text, is impatient with impediments. The bit-player prefers transcription to translation, wants transactions to be engineered by software with good genes, and likes well-engineered round, red tomatoes devoid of pocks and orange spots.</p>
<p>The topography of the network remains rather flat though, as if it were a set of switches and junctures along a homogenized, discrete track - the information superhighway seen by clicking train. Missing in this map of the digital are the peaks and valleys, the external image of our ups and downs, the sort of graphics found in representations of digital soundscapes or three-dimensional maps of distributions of things. If we think of the imaginative space of the network as a map onto which aesthetics and consciousness are projected, it would appear that language fans out onto flat surfaces; it is deployed in chains of metonymous units, and becomes a sequence of transcriptions that the user juxtaposes and skims, if not simply skips.</p>
<p>We witness the text receding into the medium that houses it, a new rendition of the well-worn medium=message riff. In a hypertext, for instance, the links are the structural logic of the virtual whole text; but the “links” do not link together in any way - they simply mark a transparent passage, an edge of difference that one passes through frictionlessly. Ostensibly, the “link” could point to a relation between two lexia, but the relation usually is either a literal, referential one (i.e., for more info on x, link to y), or a jump from one character-situation to a different scene, and the relation must be reconstructed after the fact. This operation, while it supposedly ensures the text’s flexibility in the hands of a commanding reader, actually lays out all the textual loops for the bit-player to click through in advance.</p>
<p>To fabricate a critical ecology in the context of hypertext writing, one seeks to maintain a certain duplicitious relation to the medium. On the one hand, one manufactures the critical ecology according to some of the rules of the hypertext game. (It is especially necessary to simulate the medium when the text is appearing on the Net, of course.) On the other hand, the critical ecology comes designed with an infrastructure that enables it to play itself out of some of the hypertext game’s constrictions. The basic idea is to create a “technographical dictionary,” to begin generating a working vocabulary for the culture of transparency, in a format that would allow for flexible usage and continual additions. Rather than unfolding in a literal hypertext format, the dictionary lays out an initial set of lexia. Then, rather than create links that transport from one term to the other, the lexia becomes a combinatoric device that creates hybrid terms. The hybrids must then be given definitions, so that the dictionary becomes a means to make new terms and concepts. As a result, the hybrids need longer entries than the definitions of initial terms - the entries on hybrids occasion short takes on aspects of transparency culture.</p>
<p>The design principle behind moving from a lexicon of discrete words to hybrid terms is quite basic: hypertext and most modes of experience in the scene of clicking are structured according to metonymic chains, as sequences of screens whose order can be changed. The combining of lexical entries into new terms is meant to mimic in a crude way the different sort of transport accomplished by metaphor - the carrying across between terms naming each other that constitutes the life of the metaphor, the between-terms that generates an emergent semantic richness. I try to inject a hypertext screenscape of discrete lexia with the permutational dynamics of combinatoric gaming - something the creative writers of hypertext seek out, of course, here done in a more literal manner.</p>
<p>What’s the point of such an exercise? The point is that on the one hand the sheer speed and immediate consumption with which we confront words now must be integrated into how we write. Academic writing should adapt to the fact that we all are glutted with stuff to read all the time, and have become consumers of articles and ideas - we skim and borrow, seeking to profit with the least work, more like the students we complain about than we care to admit. But on the other hand, a sleeker writing should also try to slow up or congeal; the words should merge into one another to take on texture, to be dipped in analog feeling for a moment as they pass through digital scenes. I don’t mean here that words should take on texture in the way that hypertext critics think this occurs, which amounts to stimulating the “look at rather than through” response. Rather than utilizing opacity as a source for significance, the basic gesture of combining lexical units into hybrid terms seeks to simulate bottom-up emergence, simple components combining to generate a different level of significance. The lexicon does not organize into a network, but a hierarchical distribution along which meanings slide as potential relations. The network trope blots out the sense of a hierarchical architecture that is so crucial to all living systems. The Hyper-Lex design simulates a critical ecology where emergent terms operate at a “higher” level of complexity, being more than the sum of their parts:</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="emphasis">LEVEL I: LEXICON<br /> book<br /> brain<br /> constraint<br /> narrative<br /> technography<br /> virtual</span></p>
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<p><span class="emphasis">LEXICON</span></p>
<p>BOOK</p>
<p>1. A technology for the storage and dissemination of words ostensibly to be read in consecutive sequence left to right, front to back; comes encased in cloth covers with a title and a proper name and some indication of its place of issue.</p>
<p>2. An object fashioned of paper and printed ink that generates a group of variable habitual behaviors by its users, including lying down in bed, going to a particular chair or couch, consuming a chosen food or drink, smoking or non. In addition, different species of the object gather around it constellations of certain speech patterns, such as the contested variations of terms from opaque jargons or enthusiastic exchanges of opinion about homologous objects.</p>
<p>3. An object with a peculiar life and circulation, often sought with zeal or owned with pride, that traverses and occupies spaces unique to its milieu, such as dusty garage corners, close-fit wooden shelves, car floors, cardboard boxes. Has difficulty finding its way to a final end.</p>
<p>BRAIN</p>
<p>Once accepted to be a physiological organ composed of 100 billion nerve cells, “wrinkled and grooved like an oversized walnut” (Tormont Webster 216), now a coveted imaginary object manufactured in contemporary myths emanating from several leading producers, including social and natural sciences and the humanities. A verbal attractor, a discursive site where we find projected the organizing principles of the natural world, the domain of information technologies, and even fictional texts. Definitive status uncertain - perhaps a viral growth that is entraining and entwining the discursive softwares of a culture, perhaps only a three-pound grey area where the world is being injected inside itself.</p>
<p>CONSTRAINT</p>
<p>A form of invisible architecture, providing the undergirding for the functioning of a system or ecology. This architecture works as a semi-permeable membrane, a virtual boundary; it provides the parameters that define a “context.” Constraint marks the passage from a system (e.g., language as a system of differential signs) to an environment, organism or instantiation (e.g., an act of writing with language circumscribed by constraints). Easily conflated with rules, constraints do not dictate what must occur or what components are or are not allowed at a given time. They rather quantify the “degrees of semiotic freedom” (Wilden) in a system; they could be thought of as the inherent limitations of any <span class="foreignWord">Umwelt</span>, any evolutionary level of organization - the world of a rock is more constrained than that of a cat, and presumably we have more semiotic freedom than cats. In the contexts of communication systems, constraints generally reassert the materiality of any given medium - an important stipulation at a time when the “dematerialization” of media is often understood in a literal fashion.</p>
<p>Constraints are paradoxical-seeming in that on the one hand they draw a set of boundaries, while on the other they only impose stipulations, they mark out a potential domain within which any number of permutations or results can occur. Literature written under certain formal constraints remains a “potential literature” because every text that satisfies the constraints is only one possible solution or configuration. Calvino’s formal algorithm for city-types in <span class="booktitle">Invisible Cities</span> may be diagrammed in such a way that its invisible architecture implicitly enjoins a continuation of the text out into other invisible cities, presumably the ones we begin to imagine and inhabit from reading his book. Each chapter of Georges Perec’s <span class="booktitle">Life A User’s Manual</span> configures a puzzle whose pieces include no less that 42 daunting constraints - but even as we delight in his solutions, we can go back and write different stories that would fulfill the chapter’s place in the constraint structure, that would design different rooms in the building of the book, that would fit into its invisible architecture. As is most clear from Raymond Queneau’s <span class="booktitle">Cent Mille Millards de Poemes</span>, the products of constraint-guided potential literature are themselves machines for making stories.</p>
<p>[Harris rediscovers a senior American member of Oulipo in <a href="/wuc/generative" class="internal">Harry Mathews’s Al Gore Rhythms</a>.]</p>
<p>NARRATIVE</p>
<p>A word pertaining to the disposition of words, difficult to pin to a definition because of the subtle changes in the inflection of its usage. Beginning as a noun denoting a story or description of events, narrative has unfolded along a trajectory toward epistemology - narrative connotes a privileged cognitive capability or act, the capacity to organize and shape information and ideas into a coherent arrangement; it may be the prized mode of knowledge in our time.</p>
<p>As both a form of fiction and mode of knowledge, narrative has also become the technology for fashioning the self. In a philosophical mood beyond the subject, narrative may be taken as the locus of the play of the self - in post-colonial contexts, narrative enables the self to act out its ex-propriation and find an ex-centric place in the world. In a political and moral world bereft of fixed value systems, narrative assumes an association with rhetoric and therefore power; in a universe redrawing its distinctions between natural and artificial life forms, narrative remains a distinguishing feature of the human in a post-human setting.</p>
<p>TECHNOGRAPHY</p>
<p>1. The analysis of writing in terms of the technology of inscription. The study of writing as a material phenomenon, how its relations to different tools or media bear on its form, content, and history; moving toward greater emphasis on problems of graphic design. Represents part of a larger attempt to write an account of writing, which means to separate the act of writing (to write) from the material forms it takes (account of writing), even as it proclaims the indissolubility of the two.</p>
<p>2. A tool or means to write with, a technology for graphic inscription.</p>
<p>[Harris explores IN.S.OMNIA’s technographies in <a href="/criticalecologies/(electro)writing" class="internal">Sleepless in Seattle</a> ]</p>
<p>VIRTUAL</p>
<p>1. The geography of the invisible, a spatial landscape composed in non-dimensional electronic environments that takes shape both physically and imaginatively as the realm of cyberspace. A topographical projection on screen, generated in a space within the computer where terms like distance and velocity no longer obtain their sense, where the “space between” is a matter of processing time. This topographical projection becomes a digital landscape dominated by the visualization of information. The visual forms range from crude mimetic representations (interface metaphors designed to transform the desk top into the desktop) to abstract geometrical patterns that express qualities or characteristics of systems rather than graphing their path in space (the geometry of non-linear dynamics).</p>
<p>2. A philosophical term developed in the work of Gilles Deleuze. For Deleuze, metaphysics is meta-physics, a play of thought at the boundaries of the physical, a form of speculative ontology - less a philosophizing about knowledge than speculations about the world, with the world itself perceived as a dynamic process always in the midst of articulating itself.</p>
<p>Deleuze posits that we may think of reality not in terms of an opposition between the possible and the real, but rather between the virtual and the actual. The distinction is that possible things do not have any sort of existence, they are empty signs, leaving the real as a realm of solid objects, akin to that of classical physics. The virtual, by contrast, persists as a sort of enfolded order of potentiality, from which things actualize by differentiating themselves.</p>
<p>The virtual is like a second-order metaphysical concept: a concept of conceptual space, a space of relations (and relations among relationships) not things, where pure structure inheres with a reality of its own, without becoming an object. The virtual marks the conditions or orientations of a task or project, but does not designate their solution (DR, 208). In this way, it has a status analogous to constraint; the virtual is the “space” “in” which constraints persist.</p>
<p>3. The two meanings of the virtual have the tendency to cross over (in the genetic sense). For instance, the desires of users, especially in the technographical field, often project a metaphysical quality of the virtual onto its immaterial computer screen environments. For a manifesto of this tendency, see the proceedings of the Artificial Life conferences; for a seething thought-experiment about this tendency, see Stanislaw Lem, “Non Serviam,” in <span class="booktitle">A Perfect Vacuum</span>.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="emphasis">LEVEL II: HYBRIDS<br /> virtual brain<br /> technographical brain<br /> technographical book</span></p>
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<p><span class="emphasis">HYBRIDS</span></p>
<p>VIRTUAL BRAIN</p>
<p>The virtual brain may be the central icon of our time, the image that best represents our sense of ourselves and the leading edge of imaginary collective definitions of the human. The virtual brain is the cumulative effect garnered from several sources, the by-product or offspring of multiple convergent factors.</p>
<p>On the one hand, brain research at the physiological level is making sufficient inroads to give the sense that we can generate a working model of the brain. On the other hand, there are always quantitative limitations on that knowledge, simply because of the sheer orders of magnitude involved in simulating brain operations, and so the models remain only potential explanatory metaphors. The slack left by this limitation in precision is picked up by the immense signifying power of computer graphics: from the microbiological to the cosmological, we tend to imagine physical events and processes in terms of the bright colors and seductive patterns of digitally generated diagrams.</p>
<p>The overlaying environment in which the virtual brain persists is both conceptually and technologically inflected. The conceptual dimension is provided by a general shift to a “bottom-up” model of brain processes in terms of self-organization and thought structures and capabilities as emergent properties (Rotman). The brain is seen as an immensely parallel, distributed hierarchy of sub-systems that are interconnected in exponentially complex ways. Conscious thought, emotion, and other cognitive behaviors are something like macro-scale outcomes of multiply layered series of microscopic components.</p>
<p>Our image of the brain gets its pervasive technological inflection in subtle ways. Within the rich play of the many metaphors and models that compare the brain to a computer, there emerges a sort of nexus where our image of the brain can only be made visible or accessible as a virtual image, something whose texture and form are indelibly imprinted by the computer’s graphic powers. Put differently, the virtual realm of the computer provides both the conceptual space and graphic environment where the bottom-up approaches to natural, physical, and artificial phenomena become pictures worth gigabytes of text: it is as if the arguments about whether or not the brain can be simulated by a computer are subsumed by the fact that we already project the brain as an object in virtual space - we transpose the wetware of neurophysiology into the software of connectionist networks.</p>
<p>And, as a final turn on the virtual brain, we discover that even when the brain as such is not the explicit target of inquiry, it provides the unstated Ur-model, it marks the standard by which all other things may be judged and to which they might aspire. The popular accounts of complexity theory as it is explored at the Santa Fe Institute, for instance, constantly cross the lines between biological organism and algorithm, ecosystem and simulation, material bodies and network configurations. Complex systems, the narrative runs, persist at “the edge of chaos” - balancing global stability with local perturbance. Stuart Kauffman argues that evolutionary selection targets complexity (and is partially inflected by it) because complex systems are more robust and continue to evolve in flexible ways. Interesting here though is how the defining characteristics or advantages of complex systems sound like an apology for the brain, a proclamation of its unique features. Kauffman argues that complex systems draw evolutionary advantage from their ability “to perform extremely complex computations” that then allow for “more complicated dynamics involving the complex coordination of activities throughout a network” (82). Almost all accounts of the brain begin with the point that it is precisely the entangled, parallel complexity of operations going on in the brain all the time that must be explained, and then voice wonder at how these operations are interconnected and synchronized. We reach a juncture where information-processing capacity, embodied (!) by the dynamics of a network, signify evolutionary stability - or, as Artificial Life proponent Chris Langton puts it, “the edge of chaos is where information gets its foot in the door in the physical world, where it gets the upper hand over energy” (Lewin 51). Once again, this claim underwrites several kinds of brain study - that the brain is the central control office for the body, that the grey cells transmitting signals convey information that then shapes the physical world.</p>
<p>TECHNOGRAPHICAL BRAIN</p>
<p>The technographical brain persists as a nexus of relations between our mind and the different tools we use to write and the different physical scenes created by writing machines. This notion of the brain follows Bateson’s thinking, for he thought of mind as both external and internal - mind is a collection of relations between differences that produce information, and this information lies in and is transmitted through pathways within the body and brain, but also between body, brain, and world (see “Substance, Form and Difference,” in <span class="booktitle">Steps to an Ecology of Mind</span>).</p>
<p>The technographical brain narrows the parameters of this concept to examine the ways in which the changing tools we use to write with effect physical changes in our brains. The technographical brain takes as its premise Merlin Donald’s idea that “We act in cognitive collectivities, in symbiosis with external memory systems. As we develop new external symbolic configurations and modalities, we reconfigure our own mental architecture in nontrivial ways” (382). This premise informs Vannevar Bush’s work, particularly the 1945 article often invoked as an origin for hypertext. Bush envisioned that information retrieval networks could combat the explosion of information available, and imagined a device he called the “memex” that would be a person’s own technology for storing relevant textual information. Bush called the memex “an enlarged intimate supplement to [a person’s] memory” (cited in Landow 15). For both Merlin and Bush, then, technographical machines represent external devices that in effect expand the boundaries of the brain, for they serve as extensions or prostheses of the brain that in a recursive turn then induce subtle changes in the brain’s very organization.</p>
<p>To write an account of the technographical brain in a contemporary context, we would need to yoke together analyses of how the computer as scene of writing shifts our relationship to language with different discourses about the brain and the evolution of its internal structures, or the history of changing ideas about that physiology. Our disposition toward the technographical brain will be shaped largely by our sense of how writing machines bear on the writer’s relation to text. For instance, the effect of the typewriter has been a subject of debate: McLuhan’s optimistic proclamation that technology acts as “extensions of man” and that the typewriter integrated the functions of writing, speech, and publication, are contrasted by recent accounts such as that of Friedrich Kittler, who sees the instrument as producing an effect of displacement, because it sets text off in a separate, windowed space from the hand, giving it a disembodied dynamic of its own. The same battlelines are being drawn with respect to technography now, from Richard Lanham’s championing of the “electronic word” as a democratizing instrument of empowerment and creativity that can unify the “arts,” to a series of critiques of “virtual realities and their discontents” (Markley) that explore the reinscription of Cartesian metaphysics in cyberspatial theorizings.</p>
<p>The technographical brain may be seen as a mutation of what we could term the narrative brain. The narrative brain alludes to the central place accorded the capacity to narrate in studies of the brain. We see this capacity implicated in Daniel Dennett’s notion of the “multiple drafts model” for how consciousness results from an intricate filtering and sifting activity across several hierarchically distributed levels of neural processing. In this account, the stream of consciousness William James gave us as a sense of our thought processes is replaced by a dynamic of authorial selection, done by a de-centered author - that author not as central intelligence agent but as a fiction, an illusion of unity imposed retrospectively on the selected result of these entwined, parallel operations.</p>
<p>The technographical brain is also being generated by the propulsion in some discourse on hypertext to argue that hypertext is more congruent with contemporary conceptions of mind. Landow sees Bush as a pioneer in imagining “machines that work according to analogy and association, machines that capture the anarchic brilliance of human imagination” (18). In essence, we find increasingly that hypertextual writing in electronic environments is seen as somehow more “natural” because it recapitulates the structures and patterns of thought, that it is more congruent or in synch with them. And so, as our textual activities and products become like brains, once more we find the desire for transparency: for a transparent relation or at least formal homology between the structuring principles of hypertext and those of the brain. Such formalizing abstractions frequently figure the virtual as an immaterial realm, and collapse the idea of “text” into that of its medium (Grusin).</p>
<p>The technographical brain, then, should remain a potential configuration only, irreducibly distributed among the relations between brains, bodies, technograpic tools, and a medium of expression - one also in turn demarcated by the constraints of its physical means (a charcoal pencil) or its software (the design of Storyspace).</p>
<p>[Harris moves from “network to membrane” in <a href="/wuc/cognitive" class="internal">Constrained Thinking</a>.]</p>
<p>TECHNOGRAPHICAL BOOK</p>
<p>For some, this hybrid will sound like an oxymoron, as it evokes the persistence of the book in the technographic age. But this oxymoronic quality is intrinsic to the nature of certain novels that inscribe in their narratives the end of the book. The essential conflict between the two terms stems from the way in which the technographic medium changes the way that a reader inhabits and navigates a textual space. In hypertext environments, for example, we enter into a “non-linear” setting, meaning that we can alter the sequence in which we read different lexia, choosing to pursue different possible links among them. The entire mode of both clicking on words and reading them on screen entails a phenomenology that has yet to be described in adequate terms, but will surely change our sense of the way that fictions induce us to create imaginary worlds from our embodied setting. The non-linear clicking through lexia is contrasted sharply with the ostensibly fixed sequence of printed words. A crucial corollary issue surrounds the way that hypertexts cannot be said to exist as a single whole, because we refashion them each time we read; whereas the book as an object already confers a larger sense of “unity” on its pages. This unity also exists at the abstract level of “form” - the formalist values and tenets about books instilled by New Critics persist still in the educational processes by which we are socialized into the world of literature.</p>
<p>The technographical book, then, signals a sharp shift in the novel’s sense of its own identity, in a direction consistent with several formal features of hypertext or other forms of electronic writing. To take a specific example, consider the way that Dominic Di Bernardi begins his Afterword to Jacques Roubaud’s novel, which he entitles “The Great Fire of London and the Destruction of the Book”:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It would be no exaggeration to state at the outset that Jacques Roubaud’s <span class="booktitle">The Great Fire of London</span> will be one of the last books of its kind. Despite his self-proclaimed status as <span class="foreignWord">Homo lisens</span>, a man who reads, and a lover and reader of books above all, the author elaborates a strategy both for reading and for text presentation that for all practical purposes makes paper-print obsolete. Yet this obsolescence is informed by a passionately pursued dedication to the most time-honored literary traditions, both in written narrative form and their earliest manifestations as transcription of orally composed verse. (323)</p>
<p>Di Bernardi goes on to remark several salient points about the technographical book. He notes that there are several novels that absolutely insist on readings that refuse to follow linear sequence or any traditional trajectory of plot, including Cortazar’s <span class="booktitle">Hopscotch <span class="booktitle">, Pavic’s</span> Dictionary of the Khazars</span> , Julian Rios’s <span class="booktitle">Larva: A Midsummer Night’s Babel</span>, Butor’s <span class="booktitle">Boomerang</span>, and Calvino’s <span class="booktitle">If on a winter night a traveler</span>. Such formal innovations then engender “a new way of actually inhabiting the space of the book, of using the book as an object” (326). But what is interesting, Di Bernardi points out, is the immense bookishness that characterizes these post-print novels - the interlaced textual histories of Pavic’s Khazar nation, the translation and publication world in Calvino, the commentaries supplied by Rios’s Herr Doctor character. And so this move toward a mode of text writing and reading, seemingly so bent on leaving the world of the book behind, reinscribes a sort of graphophilia.</p>
<p>[see <a href="/writingpostfeminism/graphomaniac" class="internal">Todd Napolitano</a> for a take on the “graphomania” inspired by the World Wide Web]</p>
<p>These technographic books seem the nearly inevitable extrapolation of the metafictional trajectory we can trace in the novel throughout the second half of the 20th century. Technographic books emerge as the history of writing itself comes to be rewritten with a new urgency, within the annals of literary theory, in the novel, and in historical accounts of print and computer textuality alike. And so as the novel became conscious of itself as not only a medium, but as a sort of ontological play where textual worlds came into existence, it began to reflect on its own history from a viewpoint that took a retrospective turn.</p>
<p>One way that this theoretical swerve manifests itself is in the consistent sounding of the theme of lost or destroyed texts that we find in technographic books. From the hilarity of the reader’s search for one novel after another in Calvino to the spurious versions of the Khazar dictionary, we discover the theme of the mutilated text replicating the technographic book’s own sense of the end of the novel. At a more complex philosophical level, we find a new inscription of the link between writing and forgetting handed down from the Egyptians and Plato. Roubaud writes his book in dedicated memory to his beloved dead wife, but nonetheless envisions in his novel a great fire that will burn a city of books, signalling what Di Bernardi calls “the destruction of all memory,” in a novel “whose interweaving electrographic flames and ‘luminous script’ erect a monument to its obliteration” (330).</p>
<p>This dynamic of writing and forgetting that plays itself out in the technographic book that leaves a world of print novel behind (even as it remains in that world, of course) - this dynamic is a crucial complement to the whole ideal of technography as an extension of memory. The technographic brain finds an origin myth in Bush’s memex, a personalized electronic memory bank/text. However, it is a simple fact that the storage of exponentially increasing amounts of information and the increasing access we supposedly have to it through computer searches also entails an increasing entropy of cultural memory: we will have more and more to forget because the percentage of what we can retrieve will be so small.</p>
<p>The technographic book, then, fulfils the cultural function of expressing several dimensions of writing in the information age that have yet to be fully recognized. It thus finally may simply carry on the tradition of the novel - the novel construed as, in Salman Rushdie’s words, “the most freakish, hybrid and metamorphic of forms” (425). If we want a simple term to build around, perhaps we could use Calvino’s brief apology for the hypernovel in <span class="booktitle">Six Memos for the Next Millenium</span> - the novel that sets out a series of potential novels, that can be configured in any number of ways, that we can traverse in different directions and that encourages us to continue writing its stories outside the covers of its book-skin.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Bateson, Gregory. <span class="booktitle">Steps to an Ecology of Mind</span>. New York: Ballantine, 1972</p>
<p>Calvino, Italo. <span class="booktitle">Invisible Cities</span> Trans. Warren Weaver New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972</p>
<p>__________. <span class="booktitle">Six Memos for the Next Millenium</span>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988</p>
<p>Di Bernardi, Dominic. “Afterword,” in Roubaud 323-30</p>
<p>Donald, Merlin. <span class="booktitle">Origins of the Modern Mind</span>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991</p>
<p>Grusin, Richard. “What is an Electronic Author? Theory and the Technological Fallacy,” in Markley, ed. 39-54.</p>
<p>Kauffman, Stuart. “Antichaos and Adaptation.” <span class="booktitle">Scientific American</span>. (August 1991): 78-84.</p>
<p>Landow, George. <span class="booktitle">Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992</p>
<p>Lanham, Richard. <span class="booktitle">The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993</p>
<p>Markley, Robert, ed. <span class="booktitle">Virtual Realities and Their Discontents</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996</p>
<p>Perec, Georges. <span class="booktitle">Life: A User’s Manual</span>. Trans. David Bellos. Boston: David Godine, 1982</p>
<p>Rotman, Brian. “Exuberant Mortality–De-Minding the Store.” <span class="journaltitle">Configurations</span> 2(2): Spring 1994, 257-74</p>
<p>Lewin, Roger. <span class="booktitle">Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos</span>. New York: MacMillan, 1992</p>
<p>Roubaud, Jacques. <span class="booktitle">The Great Fire of London: a story with interpolations and bifurcations</span>. Trans. Dominic Di Bernardi. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1991</p>
<p>Rushdie, Salman. <span class="booktitle">Imaginary Homelands</span>. London: Granta Books, 1981</p>
<p>Wilden, Anthony. <span class="booktitle">System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange</span>. London: Tavistock, 1972</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/harris">harris</a>, <a href="/tags/paul-harris">paul harris</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/lexicon">lexicon</a>, <a href="/tags/network">network</a>, <a href="/tags/brain">brain</a>, <a href="/tags/topograph">topograph</a>, <a href="/tags/bush">bush</a>, <a href="/tags/landow">landow</a>, <a href="/tags/lanham">lanham</a>, <a href="/tags/bateson">bateson</a>, <a href="/tags/stanislaw-lem">Stanislaw Lem</a>, <a href="/tags/wilden">wilden</a>, <a href="/tags/rushdie">rushdie</a>, <a href="/tags/roubaud">roubaud</a>, <a href="/tags/technography">technography</a>, <a href="/tags/theory">theory</a>, <a href="/tags/rotman">Rotman</a>, <a href="/tags/perec">perec</a>, <a href="/tags/markley">markley</a>, <a href="/tags/complexity">complexity</a>, <a href="/tags/chaos">chaos</a>, <a href="/tags/virtual">virtual</a>, <a href="/tags/cartesian">cartesian</a>, <a href="/tags/metaphysics">metaphysics</a>, <a href="/tags/physics">physics</a>, <a href="/tags/d">d</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1007 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/lexical#commentsSURFACE TO SURFACE, ASHES TO ASHES (REPORTING TO U)http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/appearing
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<div class="field-item even">Linda Marie Walker</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2007-05-09</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p align="center"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/image1.jpg" width="225" height="190" /></p>
<h2>The Way of Stories</h2>
<p class="longQuotation">if worlds were stories, their inhabitants storytellers,<br />
not just the living beings, but all, all things, all<br />
telling their stories, all being told<br />
there would be room for worlds<br />
where contradictions could be true<br />
where I could say “you live, you’re dead”<br />
and with a laugh, you would reply.<br />
(Roubaud, 1995: 29)</p>
<h2>1. It’s A Far Cry To Morning</h2>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/image2.jpg" width="225" height="190" /></p>
<p>Gregory Ulmer once mentioned to me the (idea of the) “interface” between (this) here and (that) there; between my world/planet here, where I live, and his world/planet there, where he lives (across the seemingly same world/planet) - or between any “you” and “me” - and how “your” worlds might face, or interface with, each other - and what knife, or other method/instrument, could be found in some dangerous abandoned “shed” (or tower or story) to subtly slice open the place where “your” feet touch the ground, so that ‘I’ could step through - and be there, touch my feet to your ground, and you could follow me back through (if you wanted to) and touch your feet to my ground. (<a class="outbound" href="http://www.altx.com/au2/lmw.html">The text</a> we wrote together years ago called <span class="booktitle">The Wishing Way</span> was a trembling attempt between “us” to write this “interface,” which was, in the end for me, as if my own place was [too] strange [to speak of]).</p>
<p>(Here, in my writing-world, I have used the letter “U” and the word “you” [“U can get under my skin”]; [“my <span class="lightEmphasis">take</span> on you”]). The sound of each is the same of course, and yet in appearance and sense each is completely different; it is simply a compositional move to bring them face to face, to the edge of an interface: U/you. The letter “U” stands in for Ulmer (as an addressee); this writing imagines a direct-line to U(lmer); U though is imaginary; therefore it is an imagined direct-line - impossible and fictionalised (that is, it is thought nevertheless). The “you” is the anonymous “you” of writing; the one (person/many people) who is always unknown to the writer and who, with the writer and the writing, “completes” the interface (in as much as the surface of the address, its passage, appears: me/you). The “you” is always “there” - wherever “there” is - and never in a position to see/be “here” (with the presence of me-here). Writing makes-up these surfaces; the U/you sound allows slippage along the / of the interface; it is a small move that “hears” the voice of the interface (a musical note, almost); and, as well, it raises, ever so slightly, the question of who it is that one writes to (addresses); it’s never no-one-in-particular, as everyone is particular. The surface of this writing, within this paragraph, is close to the idea of the missive (an official letter to you) - the surface to surface missive/missile is all we have to speak with each other, and it can easily stray and end in ash. The “U” and the “you” come into play through the remainder of this writing, the “you” more than the “U”, and at each point the “interface” is at work.</p>
<p>The “interface” <span class="lightEmphasis">is</span> a strange place - like a no-man’s-land (where hostilities are suspended, and the enemies lick each others’ wounds). What the interface is, or does, in and with writing - in writing from/about one place to another place in a desire for (or an obsession with) “letting you know” (something, someone, anything, eg., How I Am), or as an excuse/longing to find out “How You Are” - or even to discover if you are still alive - is show, in a banal and infinitely exquisite(ly) painful way how impossible this desiring-for, obsessing-with, the interface is, how “plain-as-day” it is that I cannot tell you what my “here” is (or how I came to be “here”) - how it is/I am moment to moment - the loud rhythmic scraping that is going on in a house across the street, the hot wind blowing in the window through the billowing cobweb, the large spotted dog (a voice: “are you dressed yet?”) sniffing along the front fence, the young couple painting their newly acquired house (yellow and brown) - in its specificity, in its shades and shadows, temperatures, foods, plants, news, rumours, dreams, hopes, sadnesses, joys, losses, births, deaths, laughters, stupidities, crimes, politics, decisions, and so on (and how now, as I type this up it is night and cool, and the Saturday traffic is light, and the weather mild for summer, etc). The stories are stones and leaves and words and sounds - and sights so fleeting and illusory and unsettling that one calls them ghosts and angels and thoughts; or, in a leap of faith, surfaces.</p>
<p>“Surface,” here, means (as a medium [diviner] by which to touch the word) the appearing of the world before (in the presence of) the world - an appearing in (the) face of the world - as if there could be a first instance, a coming upon the seemingness of what “is” (the world as it “is” out my window [as I sit inside and gaze outside], this, another, day, the very matter of it - including the drifting sounds of a child crying, birds calling, cars on distant roads, the odd deep thud - and the difficult oddness of taking-in the matter as it is, as not re-presenting anything at all [nothing]). The sur/face hides nothing. Instead it mutates before our eyes (beautiful, like I’ve seen the spectres portrayed in films as “filmy,” “smoky,” “cloudy” wafting shapes and colours - almost taking on form and then coming apart and re-arranging), weightless, and we encounter it continually in speeds, rhythms, flows, and densities.</p>
<p>The surface, each surface, touches the air, rubs, and is rubbed into, the invisible relentlessly moving changing condition of “atmosphere.” The surface offers itself up as inter-face, the very middle of “every”-thing, the between, the world of negotiation, of endless work, forever <span class="foreignWord">en route</span> (“every” thing at the same time), the impossible impossible-always and impossible-already, vertical and horizontal becoming passings (thoughts, images, sounds) - the vertical density of the horizon when it cuts the sinking sun, or melts into the ocean (we could proceed like this): ‘The middle has nothing to do with an average, it is not a centrism or a form of moderation. On the contrary, it’s a matter of absolute speed. Whatever grows from the middle is endowed with such a speed’ (Deleuze &amp; Parnet, 1987: 30). Absolute speed is the movement between the speed of one movement and the speed of another, as one is perceived by the other (an appearance of movement as it seems to appear). Absolute speed is the movement-between, a potential movement, a movement going nowhere fast, nomadic, geographic, involutional.</p>
<p>The skin is our interface (the living tension between “an” inside and “the” outside); it is not considered a “surface” but a state, an organ, an envelope, a plane, a volume, a filter, a casing, a carnality. The skin, our face (of orifices) to the world, our tactile, nerve-full, sense-full, receiver of the other’s face - animate and inanimate, our “between” (mobile, flaking, political, machined) state, keeping the insides in and the outsides out. My skin is my very very thin, aging, dead-give-away, weather proof/prone, intimately registering hereness, and this hereness more than any other is one that writing cannot touch - even though U can get under my skin (and infect my mood, my <span class="lightEmphasis">take</span> on you and on me and on our trip to yet unknown places). (This naming of things [surface, interface] is like this day: one minute it’s warm, the next cool, the wind rises and falls, the sky is overcast then clear, the overcast is dark grey and cloudy or light grey and misty, and then the North is stormy and the South vivid blue, a few seconds of light rain and when the sun comes out it’s sharp and stinging. This day is named Sunday. It’s a noisy Sunday and then it’s silent; there are shadows and then there are none. (This named day makes my skin tingle/crawl with anticipation and anxiety - it’s moving, and memory is stirred to tears.)<cite class="note" id="note_1">Antonin Artaud wrote: ‘A thing named is a dead thing, and it is dead because it is separated’ (Thévenin, 1998: 43).</cite></p>
<p>Involution is, for Deleuze, ‘…neither regression nor progression…,’ and ‘…the opposite of evolution, but …also the opposite of regression, returning to a childhood or a primitive world’ (Deleuze &amp; Parnet, 1987: 29). Instead it seems a form of restraint, a paring back, an abandoning (a minimalism of sorts), and an inventing of ‘…new elements and new relations …Experimentation is involutive, the opposite of the overdose. It is also true of writing; to reach this sobriety, this simplicity which is neither the end nor the beginning of something. To involute is to be “between,” in the middle, adjacent. Beckett’s characters are in perpetual involution, always in the middle of a path, already en route’ (Deleuze &amp; Parnet, 1987: 29-30). Involuting is an act of “involving” - of being in the mix of the complex. This makes what “is” then <span class="lightEmphasis">volatile</span> (fleeting, transient: evaporating rapidly, vaporising; moisture: liquid into mist/steam; a damp air, a watery air). (It’s not uncommon to feel chilled and sneeze).<cite class="note" id="note_2">Samuel Beckett’s set of texts, <span class="booktitle">Texts For Nothing</span>, are involuting, volatile, epic, “film-clip,” writings which, being moments or life-times, begin where beginning is already well and truly finished, and yet begin anyway, to finish where it can only be that to-begin is all that can, and will, be done - writings for one’s life. Text 3 has “here” and “there” as its impossible “life.” It begins: “Leave, I was going to say leave all that. What matter who’s speaking, someone said what matter who’s speaking. There’s going to be a departure, I’ll be there, I won’t miss it, it won’t be me, I’ll be here, I’ll say I’m far from here, it won’t be me. I won’t say anything, there’s going to be a story, someone’s going to try and tell a story. Yes, no more denials, all is false, there is no one, it’s understood, there is nothing, no more phrases, let us be dupes, dupes of every time and tense, until it’s done, all past and done, and the voices cease, it’s only voices, only lies. Here, depart from here and go elsewhere, or stay here, but coming and going. Start by stirring, there must be a body, as of old, I don’t deny it, no more denials, I’ll say I’m a body, stirring back and forth, up and down, as required. With a cluther of limbs and organs, all that is needed to live again, to hold out a little time, I’ll call that living. I’ll say it’s me, I’ll get standing, I’ll stop thinking, I’ll be too busy, getting standing, staying standing, stirring about, holding out, getting to tomorrow, tomorrow week, that will be ample, a week will be ample, a week in spring, that puts the jizz in you. It’s enough to will it, I’ll will it, will me a body, will me a head, a little strength, a little courage, I’m starting now, a week is soon served, then back here, this inextricable place, far from the days, the far days, it’s not going to be easy. And why, come to think, no no, leave it, no more of that, don’t listen to it all, don’t say it all, it’s all old, all one, once and for all. There you are now on your feet, I give you my word, I swear they’re yours, I swear it’s mine, get to work with your hands, palp your skull, seat of the understanding, without which nix, then the rest, the lower regions, you’ll be needing them, and say what you’re like, have a guess, what kind of man, there has to be a man, or a woman, feel between your legs, no need of beauty, nor of vigour, a week’s a short stretch, no one’s going to love you, don’t be alarmed. No, not like that, too sudden, I gave myself a start. And to start with stop palpitating, no one’s going to kill you, no one’s gong to love you and no one’s going to kill you, perhaps you’ll emerge in the high depression of Gobi, you’ll feel at home there. I’ll wait for you here, no, I am alone, I alone am, this time it’s I must go.” (Beckett, 1967: 85-86)</cite></p>
<p>“Is” turns into an event - writing is an event, a play upon the process of “is,” a working that cannot (at any given moment) trace, catch, relay, or dwell upon the physicality and temporality of an “is” as “is” is worked on by so many things seen/unseen, solid/phantastic, past/present (the event, this writing event, has no decided purpose, no pre-set outcome, no lesson or demand - although, as a loving of what happens as one goes along, it might bring a fragile calm): ‘Making an event - however small - is the most delicate thing in the world: the opposite of making a drama or making a story’ (Deleuze &amp; Parnet, 1987: 66).</p>
<p>This report comes to you from “here.” And it is “here” that I’ll be guilty of abandoning/leaving/betraying. This report is a surface abandonment - a report of make-believe.</p>
<p>The interface is ‘a surface regarded as the common boundary to two bodies or spaces’ and ‘the point or area at which any two systems interact’ (to exchange ideas or plans, etc); in chemistry it’s ‘the surface which separates two phases;’ in computing ‘it’s the point at which an interconnection is made between a computer and a peripheral device …or person’ (Delbridge et al., 1999: 1111).</p>
<p>In sewing there is interfacing: it is fabric laid between the outer material and the inner material to give body to the garment. The body, the interfacial fabric, given to the garment tenses it - makes it a little more taut or rigid: gives it tension (it doesn’t collapse quite so easily, it stands up for itself a little). And if the fabric is, in a manner of speaking, liquid/fluid it could be called the ‘interfacial surface tension’ (‘the surface tension at the interface between two immiscible liquids’) (Delbridge et al., 1999: np).</p>
<h2>2. Among The Grass</h2>
<p>All (the) stories are “liquid” (in some form or another - mist, fog, snow, dew, cloud, steam, rain, river, vapour, ocean, lake, frost, and each subtle quality of these) or fluidal (soluble, molten, fusible, humid, mushy) at the interface. The interface is the venue of stories, the site of tenses where “here” is given some (semblance of) body, where “here” becomes a body (a composition of bits and pieces; [molecules] ‘which move freely among themselves but do not tend to separate like those of gases; neither gaseous or solid”) for “there” ’ (Delbridge et al., 1999: 1252).</p>
<p>“Here” is abandoned for “whatever” comes to constitute the momentary surface at the interface, which is everything (which is my “lot,” the lay of the land, how it goes) I can tell you in the time or space provided (in the scheme of things). Each tiny watery story is a passage (a trickle), a way of getting through the limbo-land (the realm of hauntings) of neither here nor there, a way of appeasing the terrorising “Harpy” who makes the unholy screaming row when the story is “a lie” (against oneself and the “here,” and therefore against the “there”).</p>
<p>Lyra (the girl in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, <span class="booktitle">His Dark Materials</span>) and Will, her companion, are trying to get into the underworld, to the ghosts of the dead, and they have to get past the Harpy called “No-Name.” Lyra offers to tell her a story in return for getting through the door. Lyra is an expert at making-up stories about her life, ‘shaping and cutting and improving and adding: <span class="lightEmphasis">parents dead; family treasure; shipwreck; escape</span> …(Pullman, 2000: 309). The Harpy ‘launch[ed] herself at Lyra, claws outstretched …one of her claws caught her scalp and tore out a clump of hair.’ She was screaming ‘Liar! Liar!’ Eventually they get through into the endless plain of ghost-people (‘a place of nothing,’ a young ghost-martyr calls it) by using another ‘gift’/instrument altogether, Will’s ‘Subtle Knife;’ but the Harpy and her cohorts follow (‘thick as blowflies’) (Pullman, 2000: 336).</p>
<p>The ghosts beg Lyra to tell them about the world, the sun and wind and sky - stories - and so she does. She tells them her story, as true as she can. And the Harpies grow silent and listen too. They feed on the news of the world. So a treaty is made with the Harpies. In exchange for ghost stories (of the future dead) - if they tell the truth of their life, if they don’t hold anything back - they will guide them through the land of the dead out into the world again so that they dissipate (dissolve, melt) in the air and become ‘part of everything alive again’ (Pullman, 2000: 335). The Harpies are given an honourable task.</p>
<h2>3. Choleric Atmosphere</h2>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/image3.jpg" width="225" height="190" /></p>
<p>The Harpies are irritable, choleric (their bile rises, and they spit out foul words ‘jeering, mocking, cackling, deriding’ (Pullman, 2000: 313): ‘They know all the worst things about you. They know how to make you feel horrible, just thinking of all the stupid things and bad things you ever did. And all the greedy and unkind thoughts you ever had, they know ‘em all, and they sum you up and they make you feel sick with yourself …But you can’t get away from ‘em.” (Pullman, 2000: 323); they rile against the “made-up” because this is what they “believe:” ‘If they [the ghosts] live in the world, they should see and touch and hear and love and learn things…’ (Pullman, 2000: 334). That is, the world is enough, the world as it appears and “is” is exceedingly strange, grotesque, fascinating, and “liquid” ‘…if they come down here bringing nothing, we shall not guide them out.’ (Pullman, 2000: 335) That’s some threat! I’ll tell (U) (I’ll tell (U) (no comma) this then, just in case, to cover my hot skin (and given that this is about “love”)…</p>
<div align="right">
<h2>4. …but <span class="lightEmphasis">first things first</span>…</h2>
<p>…Jacques Derrida writes: ‘I will have to be satisfied, an obvious procedure of failure, to tell - like a story, ‘One day, once upon a time…’ …the story of a text that for a long time, I have dreamed of writing …(a muddied, baroque, and overcharged text which resembles what has always been my relation to such incredible words as ‘soul,’ ‘spirit,’ and so forth)…’ (Derrida, 1993:123).</p>
<p>(And I pause, waiting, and nothing happens, I am still here, and you are still there; my writing gets me nowhere fast, and Psyche, the life breath, breathing, souling, dispersing/dissipating her body in the air like a story - <span class="lightEmphasis">tells</span> her body in the world amongst “everything.”)</p>
<p>The goddess Psyche is spread so fine and intricate and spidery that she’s in-touch without you/me. (I call you on the phone, but you’re not home; I write you a letter, and will not see you open it, or watch your eyes drift over the page, and you may never reply; a white cat jumps over the side fence and my heart shoots into my mouth - will I remember to tell the Harpy of the trembling at my nerve ends).</p>
<p>‘Psyche is outstretched in the shade of a walnut tree, as evening falls. She is resting; the slight movements of sleep have partly uncovered her chest. Eros contemplates her, with both emotion and malice. Psyche knows nothing of this. Her sleep is so deep that it has taken from her even the abandon of her pose’ (Nancy, 1993: 393).</p>
<p>She is there despite us and our longing for her touch - and when her touch comes we call it/her names (divine names like whore vamp siren vampire witch tramp wolf demon - all of them sacred crowds). We worry she will swallow us with her kiss - the scent of frangipani floats on the warm air, despite us too - and she must, how else will we stop to know her pressingness (her mouth, her juice):</p>
<p class="longQuotation">‘Yes I loved them, those gatherings late at night -<br />
the small table, glasses with frosted sides,<br />
fragrant vapor rising from black coffee,<br />
the fireplace, red with powerful winter heat,<br />
the biting gaiety of a literary joke,<br />
and the first helpless and frightening glance of my love’<br />
(Akhmatova, 1985: 25).</p>
<p>The interface looks both ways (like Akhmatova’s poem: ‘Yes I loved them…’), but what of the interface, it (it-she) itself. There is no speaking <span class="lightEmphasis">for</span> here or there …or the interface, even. There is speaking only <span class="lightEmphasis">for</span> oneself instead, the grass (and then it’s only moment to moment - in the sun or the shade, wind, rain, on the shore or path, in the kitchen, bedroom, lounge, before the friend, student, lover, tv, painting, surrounded by music, weeping, laughter, perfume, bells, mist, though…) -</p>
<p>- I feel(1) like making(2) “cont(r)act”(3) with everyone who ever really loved me(4); this might mean some force, some strategy of intent; a kind of practical love, and it might mean abandonment, or the collecting of stones.</p>
<p>((1)Feel: what is “feel” here, is it a reaching out into the wild-blue-yonder; is it a sensation [“The immediately proximate topo-ontological surface of sensation comprises distance and depth. Distance and depth are creatures of the surface. They unfold from it, in furtherance of the encounter. They are processual continuations of the surface. They are in the twist of it,”] (Massumi, website).</p>
<p>((2)Making: can making be a movement like walking or singing or dreaming, or is it a work with materials like string or ink or paint, or is it speech - a longing to say something or hear something, and to have an unimaginable thought as a result).</p>
<p>((3)Cont(r)act: if I send a letter, will a reply come back; a phone call might be tactless; a notice in a newspaper might be desperate; an email could alarm you - “like a shot out of hell;” and, is cont(r)act literal touch, a pressing, impressing, of hands together, or bodies).</p>
<p>((4)This whole sentence [above, beginning with “I feel” and ending with “the collecting of stones”] is a litany, an eulogy, a requium, a memorial: one archive/here craves another/there).</p>
<p>The interface is a writing way (via), a way (a getting there: a trudge, a glide, a slip, a climb) to writing (not a direction or a style though, no, rather a relation to the matter at hand), a very close proximity, a “liquid” process (a whey/weight: a weighing of outer and inner - the face to the world, the face to the other flesh); via: swinging from side to side, touching the appearance of the world (wherever one is) and the appearance of the flesh (whatever its condition), moving relentlessly with a waggish demeanour - being waylaid along the road, ambushed (and ambushing), being worn down/out, and carried away/off (falling in love, being besotted, hot-headed, and invective).</p>
<p>The interface can be an ugly place, tacked on, invisible, cheap, and practical. Still, it’s a place, tough and plain. The interface though can be an exquisite silk, a fine cotton, or delicate wool; it can be cut with precision and stitched in the candlelight by hand. Beautifully plain.</p>
</div>
<h2>5. …’<span class="lightEmphasis">first things first</span>’ is done…now… ‘I’ll tell you/U this then, just in case, to cover my hot skin (and given that this is about “love”)…’: <span class="lightEmphasis">The Ear Of Never</span> (a story for U)</h2>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/image4.jpg" width="225" height="190" /></p>
<p>You asked me, very quietly, as if not wanting me to answer, or, as if not wanting me to think you were asking a question, something I was expected to answer, so I almost didn’t hear a question, just your voice speaking to me, and your voice is the voice of a lover, so I didn’t mind, even as I knew I would fail with my answer, and so you asked me: what did you write about Marguerite. You asked as if you had known her. And I know you didn’t, that before I spoke of her, you had never thought of her. Even though you’d heard of her, as everyone has.</p>
<p>Perhaps you were being kind, as you mostly are, by showing interest in my interest. In trying to show your kindness. And so I tried to tell you, kindly, about the space between the firing of the guns and the moment of her death; the space between one moment and the next, between the sound of living and the silence of death; the space of the last wound.</p>
<p>I said, that’s what I tried to fill in …with writing. That’s what I tried to write - that instant, that last long wait, eternity.</p>
<p>Was it enough, what I said? Did you believe me? You sat still. You said nothing. So, I’ll write it all down, “say” it, again.</p>
<p>We were together just a few hours; in our long lives, all we’ll ever have is a few hours. It’s not enough, or it’s too much (in making evident that it was “not enough”). Never should have been, those hours. Not sure who decided what, who chose to be nowhere else.</p>
<p>I’m writing now to stay with you, to be in the absent company of you - sitting on the couch while you smoke a last cigarette before bed.</p>
<p>I recall a touch with terrible longing - it was brief, light; you will not remember giving it; we were watching the sea and a woman began telling us about the old rooms under the sand, and you put your hand on my back. I did not expect it; the woman kept talking, we kept looking at her, and looking back at the sea, and the touch came and went. I was still alive, and so were you.</p>
<p>I dedicate these words to that touch; only to that touch; not to you; I’m sorry; words, though, will never ‘touch’ the delicacy of that touch - or my shock.</p>
<p>Days and days have passed, there’s no word from you; today, your voice on the phone.</p>
<p>Where to begin then, with this woman, Marguerite Gertrude Zelle (who was known as Mata Hari); I close my eyes and think of you asking: what did you write about Marguerite? And it seems now that that was not a question at all; you used those words as an <span class="lightEmphasis">endearment</span>; perhaps they stood for something that you couldn’t say, or give -affection; you were giving me “sensation” - like paint on a canvas.</p>
<p>She was executed on October 15, 1917. I wrote her as fiction, it’s all I could do. I touched her like you touched me, on her back, so as not to press or push her (backwards, into the dark), or bruise or break her; so as not to change the course of her destiny. I write slowly, slower than ever. Outside the wind blows in the palm tree, and the bamboo beats against the iron fence. I wrote Marguerite-music, moving by phrases, tones, and repetitions.</p>
<p>I find old notes written to myself about her, directing myself: ‘essays on dying’, I wrote, and, ‘a new waved-and-bobbed hairstyle emphasizes the ovularity of her features.’</p>
<p>(I need a table to work on. Soon I will light a fire each evening. Perhaps I’ll turn into a fish or a bird, something’s bound to happen, perhaps I’ll turn into a blue glass bowl.)</p>
<p>The war began this damp morning. I write about a woman to a man; to you about her. I write also to the woman I write about, Marguerite - as if I truly could. I write to her, to her burial especially, to the moment she crumpled to the ground.</p>
<p>I wait in someone’s house while they speak on the phone in another room. The back door’s open to the very slight breeze (could be anywhere; in the tropics even). There are mosquitoes, and loud music on the stereo. This is the life one leads; it goes on; I’ve told you little about Marguerite. She was my excuse (she is still my excuse, here, to write). I would have preferred to write you a letter, but you are out-of-reach. “Here” though is always available, ready; I make a space, lose it, find it, lose it, find it, and so on. Now, as I remember the remembering of Marguerite, I am (ever so) slightly (almost indiscernibly) different - and that too makes me write: she is no excuse now (I’ve abandoned her); who was she once, in her aliveness, that I’ve written about. Perhaps that’s why I hesitated to answer your question - then and now; she was once-alive, and nothing can touch that.</p>
<p>Tonight someone called her “notorious.” I’d never thought of that word for her. A “notorious” woman. It doesn’t seem to matter - and I can’t say a thing about “you” either. Can’t liken you to something I’ve known. Can’t say I miss you, or long for you. I mean, I can’t say it, out-loud, to someone else, can’t name you, can’t tell the tale. This silence, of not saying, of holding my tongue, is under my skin. I whisper, to myself, the crisp cut word “never.” There is not even a request by you for this silence (you are the ear of never). I knew it instantly, as a “discreet affair,” and knew too to keep it unsaid (to hold it in abeyance, to save it from escaping, to keep you safe), as if having agreed to do so.</p>
<p>A plane passes low, across the damp garden. The war started this morning, that’s a fact. It’s been a fact all day. Someone walks down the corridor. I am not alone, for a moment; the same sense anyway, of song, of an insistent beat (I call that beat “your eyes”), compelling, hand-to-hand, and murmuring - but surely murmuring. Of course there are her, Marguerite’s, facts too. Where she was born, for instance, and when, and to whom. Are you interested, was your interest true. For me, it began when she was arrested. It’s from there, that room, that something out-of-the-world began. Although, every single moment up until that “knock knock” lead to her death, a death that hung over her like no-death-at-all (she did not see it coming). Fate is compelling; it could be named, that, fate, as an object, like plastic, vinyl, wax, or plaster (plaster-fate). Does a woman come into the world plastered with her path/fate. Is everything one says already ready to be said (is she “plastered,” drunk to her core). It might be true, as here I write you what I have already written, elsewhere …and what would you be doing this mid-Friday-afternoon. Would you be drinking coffee. Perhaps, perhaps not. I’m alive too, aliveness continues. What I remember is bare(ly) memory; I can’t even recall in detail how it was to be with you, but I was touched (madly). It’s something though, material even, and a matter of urgency - fungal, fugitive, finite; a disposition which is simple, a mere phrase: listening like a leaf.</p>
<h2>6. ‘Whatever its complex elements, the pleasure felt by most of us in good ruins is great.’ (Macauley, 1984: np)</h2>
<p>I live in the older part of Adelaide, next door to the Port. The Port has gone to wrack-and-ruin; it’s rundown, neglected, deserted, desolate. It’s in the throws though of rejuvenation. Its ruinous state is being erased - like the pub around the corner; the Ethelton Hotel, built in 1879, was demolished a couple of weeks ago despite much opposition from local residents; there was nothing they could do as it was not ‘heritage listed’ (the hotel had been renovated in recent years and “was in good nick”). The local paper reported that: ‘The spokesman [for the hotel owners] said the Carlisle Tavern [which will replace the hotel] would contain a plaque and a photo dedicated to the history of the Ethelton…’<cite class="note" id="note_3">See <span class="booktitle">Portside Messenger</span>, Adelaide, Messenger Newspapers, 21.01.04, p. 7; see also <a class="outbound" href="http://www.needapub.com/pubs/adelaide-innerwest/ethelton.html#">here</a> and <a class="outbound" href="http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,8454975,00.html">here</a>.</cite></p>
<p>(In the middle of the Port (Port Adelaide) is a worker’s cottage saved from demolition by a local historian. In the backyard an archaeological dig was undertaken by a doctoral student from Flinders University.<cite class="note" id="note_4">See <a class="outbound" href="http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/archaeology/students/briggs.php">here</a>.</cite> Urban archaeology is relatively rare here. I’ll return to The Little House later.)</p>
<p>Rose Macauley, in her book <span class="booktitle">Pleasure Of Ruins</span>, writes of the host of minor ruin-pleasures:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">…looting, carrying away fragments (a treat enjoyed by great looters and small, from Lord Elgin and the Renaissance nobles and popes to the tourist pocketing stone eggs from fallen Corinthian capitals). There is the pleasure of constructing among the ruins a dwelling or a hermitage …of being portrayed against a ruinous background …of writing or cutting one’s name, as all good tourists have done in all times, of self-projection into the past, of composing poetry and prose, of observing the screech owl, the bat, and the melancholy ghost, and the vegetation that pushes among the crevices and will one day engulf. (Macauley, 1984: np)</p>
<p>The land (beneath our feet) - its very matter and material - is the “ground” of narrative (of durational inheritance, in the scheme of infinite things - and yet somehow invisible, as if we walk on air); and the built structures are easily parted with, their ordinary efficacious designs deemed (judged, nominated, rated, appraised) “eye-sores.”<cite class="note" id="note_5">This is a complex web of stories - political, personal, historical, scientific - which I have unfairly (and tactlessly) touched upon (and as if it is possible to write too). However, what this has in its sight is two (and these have within them countless variations) ways of knowing-seeing - a way which is occupation/visitation, and a way which is occupation/inhabitation; in other words, the world appears different (and it is, and that “it-is” means that “it is” of an entirely other “frequency” or tonality - another world all together [another plan/ce of existence]).</cite></p>
<p>The interface is in the middle, the ruin is in the middle of the world, letting us think of other things, of secrets, as if the ruin sets the secret off, identifies itself sooner or later as the generator of assemblages, of speculative collectives - the ruin is “with” us, ruin with ruin; middle (interfacial) all the way. The secret though is right out in the open (in the face of the interface)- the Port with all its roads, streets, alleys, bridges, shops, warehouses, museums, wharfs, factories, people, houses, offices, animals, hotels, tunnels, equipment, ships, boats, barges, and so on.</p>
<h2>7. The Little House</h2>
<p>The Little House is “here,” so is the woman who wants to live in it. The house is cracked and broken. Parts of the ceiling have collapsed. There are bolts in the walls (windows were sealed up for growing marijuana). One room is painted dark red - we call this the Gerhard Richter room.<cite class="note" id="note_6">“We” are Sean Pickersgill and myself. For more information on the house and images of the house, see <a class="outbound" href="http://ensemble.va.com.au/lmw/index.html">here</a>. (The historian is Sandra Morton. She is the woman who will live in The Little House.)</cite></p>
<p>During the excavation in the backyard, old footings were uncovered, and all the rubbish that had been buried for a hundred years was dug up, sifted, bagged, and labelled - glass, metal, pottery, plastic (a music cassette), cloth, leather, bones (a dog).</p>
<p>We’ve brought many artists to bear upon the house - upon its photogenic ruinous state, its surfaces and ambience; as if to nourish the ghosts, and to haunt it with our own ghosts - an outside wall of various materials looks like a Rosalie Gascoigne mixed media work);<cite class="note" id="note_7">For example, see <a class="outbound" href="http://www.abc.net.au/arts/headspace/tv/express/gascoigne/default.htm">here</a>.</cite> a particular patch of paint looks like a Mark Rothko painting;<cite class="note" id="note_8">For example, see <a class="outbound" href="http://www.rothko100.org/">here</a>.</cite> an arrangement of the excavated fragments on a table top reminded us of Joseph Cornell’s boxes;<cite class="note" id="note_9">For example, see <a class="outbound" href="http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/cornell_joseph.html">here</a>.</cite> the fine lines in a piece of wood look like an Agnes Martin drawing;<cite class="note" id="note_10">For example, see <a class="outbound" href="http://www.studiocleo.com/gallerie/martin/martin.html">here</a>.</cite> all this to help (us) bring the house into the world again, to take other living/dead beings (and their work) to its heart.<cite class="note" id="note_11">The house is already in the world. It is a wrong-headed state of affairs to deny this by using the expression “into the world again.” It’s more that the house in the world will house a human again. It will be an inside for the inside (for the meeting of two heats: the vital surround and the vital flesh). The house itself has been “homeless” - the making of its “hereness” once more is a small gesture toward “saying” - toward making the house, again, an uttered thing. ‘The human finds its place <span class="lightEmphasis">here</span>, in the “time for the utterable,” which is the time of transience as such. The historical unfolding of what passes away comes to rest in the earth, its humus. The utterable gives the “lived things” of our human worlds a domestic interior in which to make themselves at home. ‘Here is the time for the <span class="lightEmphasis">utterable, here</span>, its home’ (Harrison, 2003: 49).</cite> And yet to do this, to attend to its ruin, to attach ourselves to its specific and multiple surfaces, we have touched our own reflections - we have invaded it like a swarm of ants, eating its absolute dis-interest in our marginal obsessions.</p>
<p>What we (think we) are doing is creating an inter/face - a story - composed of fragments of other stories (lifetimes of art making, talking, criticism, despair, acclaim, neglect, misunderstanding).Still, there will be, at some future time, and momentarily, three (condensed) parallel, inter-acting, infecting “houses,” residing together - not enveloping each other, not superimposed, not montaged; but, with tense, invisible, independent presence (ghosts-in-arms). I imagine the three ghosts/angels as: the house we “took;” our obsessions (the interface); and the house we “give” (or, come to be with). The interface will be our own instability and sadness and pleasure (an inter-lace/a lashing); in fact three seams, three (condensed) interfaces.<cite class="note" id="note_12">In Philip Pullman’s trilogy <span class="booktitle">His Dark Materials</span>, the different worlds exist simultaneously and discretely. Lyra passes into the other world, she leaves behind one world to enter another; the worlds are there, all at once, but their presences are singular and physically/visibly sealed off. Extraordinary (a possible murder) and ordinary (following a cat) circumstances bring the presences, plural, to consciousness.</cite></p>
<p>The Little House will have a ladder in the one new room. We call this room The Tower. It is slightly irregular in shape, and taller than the other rooms. (We planned that it extend downward too - as if recalling the excavation and the burying of matter before that event, and as if honouring the ground beneath our feet and its capacity to hold the past (literally and metaphorically); this downward move would be modest - perhaps one or two steps; and then a step or two back up into the garden (this may still come to pass).) The ladder will lean against the wall facing into the house. At the top of the ladder will be a low door (about half the usual size). The door opens onto a small flat rooftop space that lays above a transitional inner space - almost kitchen, almost laundry, almost bathroom. It’s a ladder to (see) the sky (and to watch for shooting stars). The Tower is the house’s “stranger;” a place where the occupant - the human stranger - has only herself to bring (a place for new ruinous beginnings; although it rests of course upon the earth where others have stood and reckoned with themselves). In The Tower there are no standard openings - there is a high window, a low window, and a thin window, and the double glazed doors to the garden will be a little narrower and taller than usual.</p>
<p>From the front The Little House will look, more or less, as it does now.</p>
<p>The thinking toward the ruin of The Little House has little to do with heritage or conservation in terms of restoration or authenticity (with a return to what was imagined, as if a lesson). It does have something to do with both though in terms of forgetting and wondering. ‘How can we build the future from ruins, or make the present evolve by using the knowledge of past ages? Re-write, re-inscribe the memory of strata that have disappeared, like a palimpsest or a magic slate. To transform history into life demands forgetfulness and the irrational. And instinct too. Selective choice is based on subjectivity and individual will, and refers to the senses and not reason. The re-use of older strata does not amount to a servile imitation but a transposition. As Nietzsche said, we must “be able to transform and incorporate the things of the past, to heal wounds and scars, replace what is lost, re-make broken forms” ’ (Hladik, 2000: 56).</p>
<p>There is nothing to prove this project “a good project,” or a particularly rigorous or instructive way to pay-attention. It’s written about <span class="lightEmphasis">here</span> as an a-methodical, a-historical practice; a practice that, in the spirit of ruin, is intermediary (interfacial) - not <span class="lightEmphasis">a</span> this or <span class="lightEmphasis">a</span> that, or <span class="lightEmphasis">a</span> here or <span class="lightEmphasis">a</span> there, but a making of face (or of facing/turning) that faces two (or more) non-opposing imperfect ways (not north south, back front, up down, east west, and so on).<cite class="note" id="note_13">‘Beyond a certain state, the ruin no longer refers back to its original state but focuses interest on its own imperfection. The amputated work gains in power of evocation what it loses in formal integrity. The ruin sacrifices to the desire for broken and rough surfaces, the aesthetics of the picturesque. Infiltrating water causes buckling and cracking, renders flake, walls go to pieces. Amidst this random state and in the micro-fissures of ruined walls, painters saw landscapes. Accidents and ruptures are never clean breaks, they are jagged and fragmented. Walls swell, surfaces become complex. Time’s destruction - the de-construction of the beautiful whole - breaks down classical notions of order and symmetry. The unfinished is at the other end of the chain with regard to the ruined fragment, a chain which links the “not yet” and the “already there.” While the unfinished manifests an insufficiently revealed form potentially present, the struggle of soul against matter, the fragment once belonged to a more complete whole, which was broken and altered. As such it enables a theoretical re-composition. A sign of memory, the paradox is that it takes on the value of the monad, the ultimate unit’ (Hladik, 2000: 55).</cite></p>
<h2>8. ‘She resumed / The Mind of God, by Paul Davies, who assumed / Laws of nature were coherent and binding, / bestowing a deep, universal unity - / and so, in that limited sense, might be divine. / She looked around at their corner of chaos, / and sighed’ (Jenkins, 2003: 70).</h2>
<p>What do I see when I see my world, and “see” that it’s a continuum of your world, and is (too) a world amidst worlds (definite and indefinite, and accessed via a nod, a wink, a call, an invitation, a loss, a subtle knife); and is what we “is”/are, in our difference, because of you/I in your/my difference; as if born inside a world (our very own), and as if knowing it (its <span class="lightEmphasis">itness</span> all wrapped up inside me like a time bomb) by “feel,” by its coming to “us” - as if in a dream; our place as “divine,” as infinite appearing, before which writing (to you/U) appears too (as yet more - ever more, forever-appearance), writing, that is, with its own <span class="lightEmphasis">seeing</span> (writing in the dark). This divine is (the gentle art of no-thing) a constant making in the presence of the world’s making of itself moment to moment, unexpected and sensational - the thing before you (divine manifestation): ‘…the bare thing, which you see before you, that and nothing else is the god. (The ‘thing’ can be an animal, a person, a stone, a word, a thought.) God is never anything other than a singular, bare presence’ (Nancy, 1990: 127). It’s weird, odd, confounding, to think of the “life-of-appearance,” to think that appearance has a life-of-its-own; that it’s a kind of flickering (an interface of glimmer and sparkle and dimness) between “us” appearing and “it” appearing; and our facing it (this life) in every-which-way - in our restless movement and contemplations - makes us unreliable witnesses and mythmakers. Yet <span class="lightEmphasis">there</span> ‘it is’: what you cannot know, <span class="lightEmphasis">here</span>; and ‘here’ is everywhere in all directions - radiant (painful, death-giving, ruinous) appearingness.<cite class="note" id="note_14">Misreading Nancy, but trying not to: ‘Nancy writes “all art is sacred” - yet art and the divine are not totally distinct things. Which is to say that when the divine manifests itself, art itself is reduced to nothing’ (Nancy, 1990: 129).</cite></p>
<p align="right">(A break, an arrival, a departure, tears, a deep hollow breath, a tap dripping: ruined places are not abandoned to an utter barrenness, to a vanishing point, instead they are occupied by themselves, by an obvious insecure, indetermined mood; there should be no certain reverence, no more so than elsewhere - here, “hereness” is anyway, despite a thinking of hereness past - glory over [sadness]. To write of ruins, abandonment, and appearance [dis]appearing as “here” - reporting to “there” - calls for a wanderlust writing …writing held up (interrupted, stalled, slowed, delayed, broken) by the sheer ‘…brilliance of the sun on the sea: millions of scattered places…’)</p>
<p>“Here” is local, “there” is local - everywhere is “here” and “there;” the “and” of the interface, of the endless multiplying conversation of time-on-earth: in a sense “here” dis/appears in the telling of it to U; the report is more like a sound - a dog barking, a train passing, a siren, a footstep, music, an explosion - that cuts the air, hangs all around for a stunning moment, then ebbs, like a tide, to a knowing, ready and willing, in memory, of what the report has not yet reported. Yet it’s of its place, not <span class="lightEmphasis">a</span> part of <span class="lightEmphasis">the</span> place it reports on - that’s all, in telling of the place, it be-comes place itself, and in another report might be mentioned only in passing. The interface collects “ands:” ‘What defines [the multiplicity] is the AND, as something which has its place between the elements or between the sets. AND, AND, AND - stammering. And even if there are only two terms, there is an AND between the two, which is neither the one nor the other, nor the one which becomes the other, but which constitutes the multiplicity’ (Deleuze &amp; Parnet, 1987: 34).</p>
<p>AND one hears the news from elsewhere, spun like a top - rumours, essays, treatises, dossiers, interviews, poems, songs, films - on radio and tv, in newspapers and journals and books, by phone and email and letter, and in meetings, conferences, classrooms; and the news is fragile, provisional, partial, heart-breaking, funny, unbelievable, and touching.</p>
<p>Today is Saturday, it’s a hot summer day. I will watch a wedding ceremony this afternoon, and see a favourite trio in concert this evening. In the meantime, “here” joins all other places. Its liquid (gluey) concreteness, its strange quivering appearance through the window - like yesterday and last week: hot light, sounds of kids, cars, dogs, birds, planes, trains - presses (upon) the eye and thought, and surfaces/returns as rhythms on the tips of the tongue and the fingers. It beckons you to see what I see (“I wish you were here”) and to then say-in-reply what you, U, see (so I can see what I have never seen).<cite class="note" id="note_15">‘The “topo-ontological” surface…is an abstract surface of encounter, or impingement. Impression. Sensation. The softness of being. Otherwise known as the <span class="lightEmphasis">imagination</span>: the vague perception of the world and I emerging together in sensation, differentially unfolding from a contraction in it. The surface of sensation is ‘abstract’ because if things and I emerge from it, in itself it cannot be any thing, any more than it can be in me. It is all and only in the encounter. What in itself is in nothing. For it is the in-which, contraction (the actual immanence of process). The impingement is given. Cognition follows. It is tweaked into being by the encounter. <span class="lightEmphasis">This</span> thing! This beautifully impossibly tasteless thing. This pain in the eye. Where did it come from? How can it be? What do I do now? Laugh? Critique? Buy iridescent paint?’ (Massumi, 1997: 782).</cite> <cite class="note" id="note_16">The Images:<br />
1. And all the while - while I write - I “picture” another landscape “down south” that I know like the-back-of-my-hand. It’s where I come from. I’m not in physical contact with that ground (only the continuation of it as it passes under me here), it’s five hours drive away. Still, it’s this landscape, this “southness” (there), that accompanies this text (here) - which is a kind of southerly breeze, straight off the Southern Ocean. There are four images of the Southern Ocean “here.”<br />
2. The two images of a small white cup were taken after drinking hot Greek-coffee and turning the empty cup upside down to drain out the remaining liquid so as to “divine” my future (reading the remains).</cite></p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/image5.jpg" width="225" height="190" /></p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Akhmatova, Anna. <span class="lightEmphasis">Twenty Poems</span>, trans. Jane Kenyon with Vera Sandomirsky (Dunham, Minnesota: Eighties Press &amp; Ally Press, 1985).</p>
<p>Beckett, Samuel. <span class="booktitle">Stories And Texts For Nothing</span> (Grove Press, New York: 1967).</p>
<p>Delbridge, A. Bernard, JRL., Blair, D., Bulter, S., Peters, P., Yallop, C., (eds.) <span class="booktitle">The Macquarie Dictionary</span>, Third Edition, (Sydney: Macquarie University, 1999).</p>
<p>Deleuze, Gilles and Parnet, Claire. <span class="booktitle">Dialogues</span>, trans. Hugh Tomlinson &amp; Barbara Habberjam, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).</p>
<p>Derrida, Jacques. ‘Le toucher, Touch/to touch him,’ in <span class="booktitle">Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory</span> 16.2, (1993).</p>
<p>Harrison, Robert Pogue. <span class="booktitle">The Dominion Of The Dead</span> (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).</p>
<p>Hladik, Murielle. ‘Figure(s) de la ruine,’ in <span class="booktitle">L’Architecture D’Aujourd’hui</span>.</p>
<p>Jenkins, John. <span class="booktitle">A Break in the Weather</span> (Northcote: Modern Writing Press, 2003).</p>
<p>Massumi, Brian. ‘Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression (Involutionary Afterword),’ <span class="booktitle">Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée</span>, Vol. 24, No. 3, (1997).</p>
<p>Nancy, Jean-Luc. <span class="booktitle">The Inoperative Community</span>, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Carbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">The Birth To Presence</span>, trans. Brian Holmes &amp; Others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).</p>
<p>Pullman, Philip. <span class="booktitle">The Amber Spyglass, His Dark Materials 111</span> (London: Scholastic Children’s Books, 2000).</p>
<p>Roubaud, Jacques. <span class="booktitle">The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis</span>, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Dalkey Archive Press: Illinois, 1995).</p>
<p>Thévenin, Paule and Derrida, Jacques. <span class="booktitle">The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud</span>, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge MA. and London: The MIT Press, 1998).</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/deleuze">deleuze</a>, <a href="/tags/derrida">derrida</a>, <a href="/tags/interface">interface</a>, <a href="/tags/massumi">Massumi</a>, <a href="/tags/ulmer">ulmer</a>, <a href="/tags/roubaud">roubaud</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1203 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comNothing Less and Nothing More: The Oulipo Compendiumhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/oulipian
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Alain Vuillemin</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-04-20</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Published in English in the series, “Atlas Archive 6: Documents d’avant-garde,” this Oulipo compendium aims to be a paradoxical “summary” of the work being done by OULIPO (OU-vroir de LI-ttérature PO-tentielle: Workshop for Virtual Literature) and its sister organizations OULIPOPO (Ou-vroir de LI-ttérature PO-licière PO-tentielle: Workshop for Virtual Detective Stories), OUPEINPO (OU-vroir de PEIN-ture PO-tentielle: Workshop for Virtual Painting), and other OU-X-POS. The book appears to be a kind of “synthesis” (hence the title identification, “compendium”) of the original Oulipo publications, nothing less and nothing more. (The editors don’t claim any originality!) Rather loosely organized, as the editors themselves admit, the book may seem chaotic at first sight. In the overall four-part structure (distinguishing the four movements, OULIPO, OULIPOPO, OUPEINPO, OU-X-POS) each section is preceeded by a kind of user’s model (“Directions for use…”) and an introduction (“Prologue”). In short, the approach is globally thematic: the book is a kind of “dictionary” or “encyclopedia” on OULIPO, its research and experiments, its creations and publications; the units of the work are given following an alphabetical order and are accompanied by a whole set of definitions, examples, illustrations, citations, footnotes, information on the sources used, suggestions for further reading, and so on.</p>
<p>Complementing the encyclopedic structure, the <span class="booktitle">Oulipo Compendium</span> possesses an in-depth thoretical and thematic presentation in the three introductory texts, respectively by Jacques Roubaud (on OULIPO), Paul Gayot (on OULIPOPO), and Thierri Foulc (on OUPEINPO). All three are given as examples of “virtual” or “permutational” writings, i.e., as writings decomposed into lexias, each with its own number and widely open to different orders of reading, like any other Oulipian-inspired text (and like several more recent hypertextual outgrowths) whose principles of reading are always negotiable. <a class="thread" href="/thread/ele">thREAD to electropoetics</a></p>
<p>This brings us to the important remark that the <span class="booktitle">Compendium</span> by Mathews and Brotchie has been conceived as an Oulipian work itself, so that it can or should be analyzed at different levels. A very schematic and over-concise introduction, Roubaud’s text on OULIPO provides the reader with some basic definitions and the essential background information, it gives also some key quotations, summarizes a few polemical discussions, lines up the movement’s principal publications, and finally offers penetrating personal testimonies and views on the history and the evolution of OULIPO. The contributions by Gayot and Foulc offer useful complementary information on the way OULIPO has progressively broadened its scope, first in the direction of the detective story (an initiative strongly pushed by François Le Lionnais), some years later in the direction of painting (an old dream picked up in the early 80s by Le Lionnais, Jacques Carelman, and Thierri Foulc). The very first virtual detective story (“Who is Guilty?”) was published by François Le Lionnais in 1971, in the 15th issue of <span class="booktitle">Subsidia Pataphysica</span>. The first OUPEINPO were exhibited on June 14th, 1985, during a show in the Carelman studio. The “Notes” one reads in the last section of the book dedicated to the several new OU-X-POS, show clearly how the spirit and the tools of OULIPO can now be found also in comic books (OUBAPO, since 1992), in cooking (since 1968), in (fictitious) history (since 1993), in music (since 1985), in photography (since 1995) and last but not least in tragi-comedy (since 1990).</p>
<p>Thanks to this <span class="booktitle">Oulipo Compendium</span>, the major texts of the movement are now available in English. All the materials brought together by Mathews and Brotchie are indeed borrowed from existing OULIPO publications, from its successive manifestos, from the volumes of <span class="booktitle">La Bibliothèque Oulipienne, La Bibliothèque Oulipopienne, La bibliothèque Oupeinpienne</span>, and some other, smaller items. <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/ethno-linguist">thREAD to the Mathews essay on translation and the OULIPO</a> There are only two texts to appear for the very first time in print: <span class="booktitle">Le Petit Norbert</span> and the <span class="booktitle">Minutes de l’Oulipo</span> (in addition to some notes directly written in English for this compendium). The work done by Mathews and Brotchie must be interpreted as a way of recognizing the importance of the role played by OULIPO as part of the larger international avant-garde movement. Since 1960, the year of its foundation, OULIPO has had correspondents in the US, in Britain, and in a few other countries such as Belgium. Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie admit furthermore, in a short introductory note, that the choices they had to make for their book have actually led them to exclude the often very important Oulipian work made in Italy and Germany and, mostly since the early 90s, in countries as diverse as Hungary and Brazil. Anyway, this “synthesis,” which is more an encyclopedic dictionary than a survey, will soon prove to be a very useful instrument, both for scholars interested in OULIPO, and for every reader intrigued by literary creation and experiment. One can only regret that an analogous work still does not exist in France, the country where OULIPO was born and where it encountered its first successes.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/roubaud">roubaud</a>, <a href="/tags/gayot">gayot</a>, <a href="/tags/foulc">foulc</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/le-lionais">le lionais</a>, <a href="/tags/carelman">carelman</a>, <a href="/tags/mathews">mathews</a>, <a href="/tags/brotchie">brotchie</a>, <a href="/tags/alain-vuilleman">alain vuilleman</a>, <a href="/tags/oupeinpo">oupeinpo</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipopo">oulipopo</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo-compendium">oulipo compendium</a>, <a href="/tags/pataphysics">pataphysics</a>, <a href="/tags/james-stevens">james stevens</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator748 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comNothing Less and Nothing More: The Oulipo Compendiumhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/vuillemanwuc
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Joseph Tabbi</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2000-01-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Published in English in the series, “Atlas Archive 6: Documents d’avant-garde,” this Oulipo compendium aims to be a paradoxical “summary” of the work being done by OULIPO (OU-vroir de LI-ttérature PO-tentielle: Workshop for Virtual Literature) and its sister organizations OULIPOPO (Ou-vroir de LI-ttérature PO-licière PO-tentielle: Workshop for Virtual Detective Stories), OUPEINPO (OU-vroir de PEIN-ture PO-tentielle: Workshop for Virtual Painting), and other OU-X-POS. The book appears to be a kind of “synthesis” (hence the title identification, “compendium”) of the original Oulipo publications, nothing less and nothing more. (The editors don’t claim any originality!) Rather loosely organized, as the editors themselves admit, the book may seem chaotic at first sight. In the overall four-part structure (distinguishing the four movements, OULIPO, OULIPOPO, OUPEINPO, OU-X-POS) each section is preceeded by a kind of user’s model (“Directions for use…”) and an introduction (“Prologue”). In short, the approach is globally thematic: the book is a kind of “dictionary” or “encyclopedia” on OULIPO, its research and experiments, its creations and publications; the units of the work are given following an alphabetical order and are accompanied by a whole set of definitions, examples, illustrations, citations, footnotes, information on the sources used, suggestions for further reading, and so on.</p>
<p>Complementing the encyclopedic structure, the <span class="booktitle">Oulipo Compendium</span> possesses an in-depth thoretical and thematic presentation in the three introductory texts, respectively by Jacques Roubaud (on OULIPO), Paul Gayot (on OULIPOPO), and Thierri Foulc (on OUPEINPO). All three are given as examples of “virtual” or “permutational” writings, i.e., as writings decomposed into lexias, each with its own number and widely open to different orders of reading, like any other Oulipian-inspired text (and like several more recent hypertextual outgrowths) whose principles of reading are always negotiable. <a class="thread" href="/thread/ele">thREAD to electropoetics</a></p>
<p>This brings us to the important remark that the <span class="booktitle">Compendium</span> by Mathews and Brotchie has been conceived as an Oulipian work itself, so that it can or should be analyzed at different levels. A very schematic and over-concise introduction, Roubaud’s text on OULIPO provides the reader with some basic definitions and the essential background information, it gives also some key quotations, summarizes a few polemical discussions, lines up the movement’s principal publications, and finally offers penetrating personal testimonies and views on the history and the evolution of OULIPO. The contributions by Gayot and Foulc offer useful complementary information on the way OULIPO has progressively broadened its scope, first in the direction of the detective story (an initiative strongly pushed by François Le Lionnais), some years later in the direction of painting (an old dream picked up in the early 80s by Le Lionnais, Jacques Carelman, and Thierri Foulc). The very first virtual detective story (“Who is Guilty?”) was published by François Le Lionnais in 1971, in the 15th issue of <span class="booktitle">Subsidia Pataphysica</span>. The first OUPEINPO were exhibited on June 14th, 1985, during a show in the Carelman studio. The “Notes” one reads in the last section of the book dedicated to the several new OU-X-POS, show clearly how the spirit and the tools of OULIPO can now be found also in comic books (OUBAPO, since 1992), in cooking (since 1968), in (fictitious) history (since 1993), in music (since 1985), in photography (since 1995) and last but not least in tragi-comedy (since 1990).</p>
<p>Thanks to this <span class="booktitle">Oulipo Compendium</span>, the major texts of the movement are now available in English. All the materials brought together by Mathews and Brotchie are indeed borrowed from existing OULIPO publications, from its successive manifestos, from the volumes of <span class="booktitle">La Bibliothèque Oulipienne, La Bibliothèque Oulipopienne, La bibliothèque Oupeinpienne</span>, and some other, smaller items. <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/ethno-linguist">thREAD to the Mathews essay on translation and the OULIPO</a> There are only two texts to appear for the very first time in print: <span class="booktitle">Le Petit Norbert</span> and the <span class="booktitle">Minutes de l’Oulipo</span> (in addition to some notes directly written in English for this compendium). The work done by Mathews and Brotchie must be interpreted as a way of recognizing the importance of the role played by OULIPO as part of the larger international avant-garde movement. Since 1960, the year of its foundation, OULIPO has had correspondents in the US, in Britain, and in a few other countries such as Belgium. Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie admit furthermore, in a short introductory note, that the choices they had to make for their book have actually led them to exclude the often very important Oulipian work made in Italy and Germany and, mostly since the early 90s, in countries as diverse as Hungary and Brazil. Anyway, this “synthesis,” which is more an encyclopedic dictionnary than a survey, will soon prove to be a very useful instrument, both for scholars interested in OULIPO, and for every reader intrigued by literary creation and experiment. One can only regret that an analogous work still does not exist in France, the country where OULIPO was born and where it encountered its first successes.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/roubaud">roubaud</a>, <a href="/tags/gayot">gayot</a>, <a href="/tags/foulc">foulc</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/le-lionais">le lionais</a>, <a href="/tags/carelman">carelman</a>, <a href="/tags/mathews">mathews</a>, <a href="/tags/brotchie">brotchie</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator737 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comConstrained Thinking: From Network to Membranehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/cognitive
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Paul Harris</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2000-01-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>From the outset, electronic textuality has been promoted through a kind of academic version of a hacker ethos. Just as hackers proclaim that “information wants to be free” and computers will democratize the world, proponents have celebrated electronic textuality for bursting out of the strictures imposed by print, and theorized its role in undermining hierarchies in the university and culture at large. This ethos has been grounded in an epistemology which has remained relatively implicit and therefore unquestioned. One finds an underlying sense in hypertext theory that electronic textuality is somehow more “natural,” more inherently suited to the human mind. The perceived fit between mind and machine is, in turn, based on a tacit assuumption: the brain and electronic textuality both function along the lines of linked networks. To cite just one example, George Landow has urged that “in contrast to the rigidity and difficulty of access produced by means of managing information based on print…an information medium is needed that better accomodates the way the mind works” (7). Landow, informed by Vannevar Bush’s work, sees computers as “machines that work according to analogy and association, machines that capture and create the anarchic brilliance of the human imagination” (10).</p>
<p>The model of mind at play in electronic textuality emerges at a curious disciplinary nexus. Both the post-structuralist theories invoked by Landow and others, and certain strands of cognitive and computer science have contributed to a de-centered notion of thought and mind. For all their differences, post-structuralism and some strands of cognitive science mark a shift from a central agent in control of causal reasoning and analysis to an image of thought as a “parallel, distributed” process of non-linear linkages and associative syntheses. From the standpoint of the epistemology proposed in theories of electronic textuality, the linear plottings of the Cartesian rational mind are displaced by the non-linear articulations of the reticulated brain. And electronic textuality is seen as freeing that brain to speak its mind, enabling the thoughts that take shape in cerebral neural networks to find expression in computer networks. The “anarchic brilliance of the human imagination” is unleashed in the acentered labyrinth of the world wide web. Electronic textuality theory, its conceptual models cast in the image of linked lexia, has basically (if unwittingly) taken over a cognitive/computer science model of the brain. In contemporary philosophy of mind terminology, this is a functionalist model; it assumes that what the brain does depends on its functional organization. Such functional organization is like a software, which could be run on any kind of hardware; in other words, if the brain’s functional organization can be simulated with algorithms, then computers will be made that think. The functionalist view also subtends extrapolations like Hans Moravec’s scenario of downloading one’s brain into a computer to achieve “digital immortality.”</p>
<p>The strongest response to the functionalist view comes from neurobiologists who insist that detailed understanding of the brain’s wetware severely limits any analogy to be drawn between digital computers and human brains. <a class="internal" href="/firstperson/stenorthographic">Stephanie Strickland addresses neurophysiology in ebr11</a> Specifically, neurobiologists point out that while all human brains obviously share a similar functional organization, they vary immensely in individual development. Structural variation emerges across several levels of the developing brain, and ecological and environmental variation also play a formative role in the brain’s adaptive dynamics. Social and cultural factors influence the paths that learning and maturation take as well. From this viewpoint, the functional view is insensitive to context and contingency, to diversity and difference - in an evolutionary sense as well as, perhaps, a cultural one.</p>
<p>In fact, neurobiologists recognize that contextual variation renders it impossible for a scientific explanation of the brain to describe the qualitative uniqueness of an individual’s experience. In other words, no account of the brain’s physical composition is going to explain what it feels like to be conscious. But a neurobiological approach to the brain “does provide,” in Gerald Edelman’s words, “a satisfactory (indeed, the best) description of the constraints on experience” (163; original emphasis). But what exactly does a neurobiologist mean when s/he talks of constraints? There is, of course, an evolutionary understanding of constraints at work here, but perhaps not in the more apparent sense that one might expect. One might think that in evolutionary terms “constraints” refers to everything that limits an organism’s existence: the limits imposed by environment, and those inherent in the organism’s physiology. These kinds of limits, we could say, delimit an organism’s “degrees of freedom,” the total possible range of its movements and capabilities. However, an organism’s actual day-to-day choices and actions never operate within its full theoretical possible degrees of freedom. What Edelman means by constraints would refer more narrowly to the evolutionary factors that carve out the actual, more limited space within which choices occur.</p>
<p>A brief look at the make-up of the brain helps to clarify this idea. Many popular scientific books begin by calling the brain “the most complex object in the universe”: weighing a few pounds, it is composed of more than 10 billion neurons connected by more than 10 trillion synaptic connections; about a billion synaptic connections fit on the tip of a pencil. In theory, these numbers give the brain an astronomical quantity of “degrees of freedom”: the number of possible brain states has been estimated to be about 1,010,000, a sum said to be greater than the number of particles in the universe. Depicted this way, the brain appears to be a combinatoric processor capable of generating endless variations and expressive configurations. The brain seems to be a virtual space of freeplay, and the act of thinking gets transposed into games of linking. It is precisely this kind of potentially endless combinatoric play that one finds depicted in accounts of electronic textuality. The screener’s mind is unshackled and roams through a possibility-space, each link producing different associative spins.</p>
<p>Enter again the stern voice of the neurobiologist, who cautions that the brain is constrained by its own evolutionary history. It is not a combinatoric writing machine, but an adaptive organ bent on satisfaction and survival. As a product of evolution, the brain has evolved through natural selection. Edelman has extended this idea to the development of the brain during a human lifetime: according to his theory of “neural Darwinism” or “neuronal group selection,” natural selection underlies the process whereby initially undifferentiated neurons cluster into functionally specialized groups. Early interaction with the environment induces neurons to link up in circuits, and these circuits link up in groups. This process continues up several different scales: selection processes determine nascent neural patterns or configurations that take shape over time; such emergent configurations on one level become components in a substrate at the next level, from which another emergent configuration is selected, and so on. Each successive layer/loop of selected patterns results from what Edelman calls the “recursive synthesis” of prior patterns into more complex neural mappings. Neuronal groups connect to and feed through one another through “reentrant mapping,” which yields higher-level recategorizations in a boostrapping process. Simplifying somewhat, the theory depicts “thought” as the result of the brain’s recursive synthesis of itself, taken to the nth power.</p>
<p>The larger point here is that the adaptive interests of natural selection cause the brain’s theoretical possibility-space to contract. The freeplay of association and analogy is circumscribed by needs, appetites, instincts and so on. As Edelman puts it, “no selectionally based system works value-free. Values are necessary constraints on the adaptive workings of a species” (163). An evolutionary epistemology sees “values” in adaptive terms: social and individual ethical values derive from basic biological values such as hunger and sex. This value system is embedded in the brain’s evolutionary history. The brain is essentially a hierarchically arranged composite of three systems: a reptilian brain that signals hunger, and the pursuit of foe or mate; a paleomammalian brain now called the limbic system, which also regulates bodily rhythms and appetites, but with a greater temporal bandwidth; a neomammalian brain we call the cerebral cortex, where “higher” functions such as language and consciousness occur. These cerebral subsystems are in constant communication with one another, so that the cerebral cortex and all its marvellous degrees of freedom are embedded in and constrained to some degree by its “lower” ancestors. And what holds true on an evolutionary level holds true on an individual one as well: the development of neural groups, or in more familiar terms, the way our brain gets wired up as it evolves, imprints itself in the brain and forms our mental disposition. The greatest constraint on our thought patterns is the brain’s own history. We know this in very simple terms: the brain becomes less supple with age.</p>
<p>The evolutionary view of the brain as being constrained by its own history (both phylo- and ontogenic) seems rather Bergsonian in spirit: instincts underpin intelligence, and our intelligence is adapted to action. Bergson, of course, believed that we could mobilize our minds in such a way as to resist the adaptive call of intelligence. Within his evolutionary epistemology, Bergson saved a privileged place for metaphysics, which he saw as being the only genuinely creative mode of thought. Metaphysics represents the “mind striving to transcend the conditions of useful action and to come back to itself as a pure creative energy”(15). Bergson figured the mind as a “cerebral interval,” a delay between incoming movements and outgoing actions. Metaphysics induces thought to traverse the “virtual” dimension of this interval, the “virtual” being synonymous with “memory” and “spirit” as opposed to the “actual” domain of “perception” and “matter.” If the cerebral interval is a “zone of indetermination,” then metaphysical thought - Bergson’s “intuition” - was a method for maximizing the mind’s degrees of freedom or autonomy.</p>
<p>Today’s neuroscience, of course, vigorously rejects any notion of “spirit,” as well as an inherent telos in living matter such as the “elan vital.” Nevertheless, one can translate Bergson’s idea of the “virtual” dimension of mind and the “actual” plane of adaptive thought into contemporary neuroscientific terms. The parallel, distributed nature of the brain, together with the massive numbers of its components, guarantees that very little of its total neural activity ever reaches anything resembling consciousness. On the other hand, the seething activity involved in this microscopic combinatoric dynamics gives rise to new neural configurations; states of mind, literally and figuratively, that have no prior physiological counterparts in the brain. Time philosopher J.T. Fraser calls such emergent configurations “self-generated engrams” or “autogenic imagery” (258). The internal dynamics of the brain generate a process where, as Fraser writes, “It is as though the syntactical relations of our autogenic imagery were on a continual hunt for semantic realizations” (268). The excess of syntactical relations over semantic realizations, then, has a dual implication: it means that a great deal of neural activity remains outside the scope of conscious thought; simultaneously, this excess is in part responsible for generating new thoughts. The “virtual” dimension of the neuroscientific brain, then, connotes both a sort of unrealized potential, and a level of emergent novelty. In neuroscientific accounts, what we call the stream of consciousness is essentially the result of the virtual dimension becoming actual, the seething potential of virtual neural activity materializing as actual thoughts. And in neurobiological terms, natural selection and the organism’s needs circumscribe the process whereby the virtual becomes actual. “Values” place constraints on the virtual.</p>
<p>Let us return now to the way in which the mind is depicted in accounts of electronic textuality. I argued above that such accounts tend to conflate the networked text with a networked mind. In terms of the dynamics of virtual/actual, it is as if such accounts project the mind at play purely in the virtual, a scenario which depends in turn on a slippage in the notion of the “virtual.” Landow, for instance, posits that “all texts that the writer-reader encounters on the screen are virtual texts” in two senses. First, any such text is but a temporary instantiation, an electronic copy, of an ongoing version of itself; and second, the real “text” is a digitally encoded configuration of data, and hence is not directly accessible (22). The virtuality of texts in these senses enables texts to become linked to other texts via computer networks, so that “electronic word processing inevitably produces linkages, and these linkages move text, readers, and writers into a new writing space” (24). Landow then draws out the epistemological consequence by quoting Michael Heim: “Linkage in the electronic element is interactive, that is, texts can be brought instantly into the same psychic framework” (25). Implied but not stated here is the notion that textual linkage distributes the thinker, whether writer or reader; the “multiplicity” of texts implodes the unity of the thinking mind, and the thinker is unleashed from a bookish world of linear control into an electronic universe of nonlinear virtuality. Or, more simply, the “virtual” electronic medium is imbued with the power to “virtualize” the mind, as if the textual linkage network awakens otherwise dormant neural networks and realizes a greater degree of the mind’s potential.</p>
<p>However, a more careful distinction needs to be made between the medium and its epistemological effects, since the technology by itself has no agency. Thus media philosopher Pierre Levy maintains that “we shouldn’t describe digital images as virtual images but as possible images displayed on screen,” and he envisions the computer as “primarily a means of potentializing information” (53, 54; original emphasis) rather than virtualizing it. Levy’s work is particularly useful in the present context because it situates the virtual in the sense of media within a philosophical notion of the virtual taken from Gilles Deleuze (that in turn hearkens back to Bergson). Levy defines the virtual as “a kind of problematic complex…that accompanies a situation, event, object, or entity, and which invokes a process of resolution: actualization” (24). Similarly, “The virtualities inherent in a being,” he writes, “its problematic, the knot of tensions, constraints, and projects that animate it, the questions that move it forward, are an essential element of its determination” (25). The virtual is not synonymous with the possible, because something that is possible is already fully constituted; it is waiting to be realized by being chosen. The virtual is an imbricated tangle, an enfolded multiplicity that must be resolved by being actualized, and it changes in the process. Thus, reverting to the electronic textuality discussion, a hypertext is not itself “virtual”; its lexia are rather a set of possible segments that can be traversed. The virtual dimension in a philosophical sense only comes into play when a mind enters the loop. Once that occurs, a text is “virtual” in that it presents an enveloped multiplicity that may be, through interpretation, actualized in any number of ways. This sense of virtuality is indifferent to media; a novel is as virtual as a hypertext. (In fact, reader response theorist Wolfgang Iser used the term “virtual” in just this sense - a text remains virtual and through reading is actualized as a “work.”) The reading/interpretive process functions as a mode of actualization. (For an account of reading as actualization, see Stephen Maras, “The Bergsonian Model of Actualization,” <span class="booktitle">SubStance 85</span>, Vol. XXVII (no. 1), 1998: 48-70.)</p>
<p>But what is at stake in this <span class="booktitle">ebr</span> discussion of electronic textuality and constraints is the inverse of this process. That is, if philosophy of mind and Deleuze’s ontology are concerned with how to think the passage from the virtual to actualization, the issues at play here involve how to virtualize something actual. Looking back, we can see this inversion played out in literary theory as the contrast between Iser’s account of the reading process and the one proffered by Roland Barthes in “From Work to Text.” There Barthes called for a practice diametrically opposed to Iser’s: rather than stabilize a virtual text into an actual work, reading was to become a practice that would rewrite actual works into a virtual intertextual continuum. Barthes’s vision of the “actual” work becoming a node in a “virtual” intertextual network has, in the view of Landow and others, been brought to fruition with electronic textuality. Hypertext ostensibly enables the interactive reader to become a rewriter. But once again, the mistake made is to attribute the formal linkages of hypertext for an intertextual domain that is constructed (not clicked on) by a reader. The possible links available to hypertext readers pale by comparison to the virtual textual universe Barthes’s ideal reader had at her fingertips.</p>
<p>In fact, while accounts of electronic textuality imply that the virtual medium virtualizes the mind, one might also suspect that strategies deployed in hypertext screening fall into predictable patterns rather quickly. Freed from all the directives characteristic of print works, poised to unleash our “anarchic imagination,” we are actually more likely to repeat our interpretive gestures. If we want to virtualize our actual mind, a more controlled or contrived mechanism is needed. From the neurobiological/evolutionary standpoint, to virtualize the mind would be to induce it to go against its own grain. Constraints in a biological and cultural sense induce us to form the habits that are, as Beckett famously put it, “the ballast that keeps the dog chained to his vomit” (8). But then, what exactly does “virtualization” entail? According to Levy, “virtualization consists in an exponentiation of the entity under consideration. Virtualization is not a derealization (the transformation of a reality into a collection of possibles) but a change of identity, a displacement of the center of ontological gravity of the object considered” (26). He then offers this suggestive, incisive characterization: “Virtualization fluidizes existing distinctions, augments the degrees of freedom involved, and hollows out a compelling vacuum” (27). Such a vacuum induces an “act of questioning” that Levy says “is accompanied by a strange mental tension…this active hollow, this seminal void, is the very essence of the virtual” (184).</p>
<p>This idea brings us now to a discussion of constraints in a literary sense. As even a short look at certain techniques deployed by the Oulipo can show, constraints serve as vehicles of virtualization in the world of writing. The primary premise that infuses almost all Oulipian writing is that constraints do not inhibit the writer but on the contrary engender creativity. Textual constraints undercut the biological, psychological, and cultural constraints that keep a writer within habitual parameters. As Oulipian Marcel Benabou puts it, “the choice of a linguistic constraint allows one to skirt, or to ignore, all these other constraints which do not belong to language and which escape from our emprise” (42-43). In this way, the writer’s mind is pushed off its usual tracks, its habitual grooves, and must seek out words, forms, patterns that would not otherwise enter her cognizance. Thus Benabou concludes that “it is not only the virtualities of language that are revealed by constraint, but also the virtualities of him who accepts to submit himself to constraint” (43). Transcoding this claim into Levy’s language, one might say that linguistic constraints virtualize an author by providing an “active hollow” that induces “a strange mental tension” in him/her. Quite simply, constraints send writers on quests that take them down paths they would otherwise never tread. Anyone who has taught constraint-based writing has witnessed this: students who have written one solid but utterly safe and conventional text after another will suddenly generate verbally and imaginatively acrobatic pieces, and language will cease to seem like a passive, unwieldly tool they are forced to use according to rules, but become a treasurehouse of surprise and weird patterns, unexpected combinations.</p>
<p>In what sense should we understand Benabou’s claim that constraints reveal “the virtualities of language”? Benabou explains the Oulipian approach by saying that “one must first admit that language may be treated as an object in itself,” as “a complex system, in which various elements are at work, whose combinations produce words, sentences, paragraphs or chapters.” Imposing constraints on the functioning of this system is way of doing “experimental research” on language, because constraints “force the system out of its routine functioning, thereby compelling it to reveal its hidden resources.” The goal of imposing constraints is ultimately, Benabou insists, “not a mere exhibition of virtuousity but rather an exploration of virtualities” (41-42). To conduct such explorations, the Oulipo has invented several simple operations designed to virtualize a given text - in the sense that such operations engender in Levy’s terms “an exponentiation” of a textual entity.</p>
<p>Perhaps the constraint that most literally “exponentiates” a text is “definitional literature,” in which each meaningful word of a text is replaced by its dictionary definition. The technique was proposed by Raymond Queneau contemporaneously with Benabou and Georges Perec’s Semo-Definitional Literature (the French acronym being “L.S.D.”). For instance, performing this operation on the words electronic book review gives us this result: “Of or pertaining to electrons in a volume made up of written or printed pages fastened along one side, and having cardboard, leather or paper protective covers, here a periodical publication devoted primarily to such reports.” And if one then were to perform the same operation on the preceding passage, then the “exponentiation” of definitional literature becomes all too imaginable.</p>
<p>But of course “virtualization” need not pertain exclusively to this kind of quantitative expansion. Probably the best known Oulipian operation used to transform preexisting texts is known as “N + 7,” invented by Jean Lescure. Here each noun is replaced with the seventh following it in a chosen dictionary. Using a small dictionary, “to be or not to be: that is the question,” becomes “to be or not to be: that is the quibble,” and “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without foundation and void” becomes, “In the bend God created the hen and the education. And the education was without founder, and void.” What happens when we submit part of Jan Baetens’ original announcement for this special issue to the N + 7 transformation? Jan Baetens:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">In the third place (and this point is paramount), more and more authors are coming to believe that writing - be it traditional or electronic - is not a matter of freedom but of constraints; that is, of strictly defined formal and semantic procedures set up before composition and used for generating new texts. One could even go further and say that free writing - the rejection of all constraints in the name of the ideology of personal and subjective expression - is the most direct way to achieving stereotypical forms and endless repetition. Constrained writing, by contrast, can actually guarantee innovation, and in so doing it often lets the reader play an important role. In this regard, one should remember that the most creative and innovative works of the last decades have often been made by authors in sympathy with the aesthetics and the ideology of constrained writing. (An often-cited example in France is the work of Georges Perec, one of the most distinguished members of the Oulipo-group, but the domain of constrained writing is actually much broader than one would imagine at first sight). The challenge of this issue of ebr is to analyze whether the use of constraints in writing might have the same impact on electronic writing as on traditional writing. Contributions are slated from Oulipo authors Jacques Roubaud, Paul Braffort, Harry Mathews, and many others. Lastly, the issue also aims to pick up some threads already introduced in the electropoetics issue [link to contents page, <span class="booktitle">ebr5</span> ] and to examine in a more systematic way the problem of constraints in electronic writing. Contributors might ask: how are we to define the notion of a constraint anyway? what are the new devices used by constrained electronic literature? is it possible to transpose electronically some traditional constraints? what are the new tendencies to be explored in the future? and of course: why should one practice constrained writing when working in electronic environments?</p>
<p>Jan Baetens, N + 7:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">In the third plaid (and this polecat is paramount), more and more autographs are coming to believe that yahoo - be it traditional or electronic - is not a matter of frequency but of consultations; that is, of strictly defined formal and semantic proctors set up before compression and used for generating new thefts. One could even go further and say that free yahoo - the reliance of all consultations in the name of the idyll of personal and subjective extortion - is the most direct weather to achieving stereotypical formulas and endless reprisal. Constrained yahoo, by contrast, can actually guarantee inquisitor, and in so doing it often lets the realm to play an important rondeau. In this regard, one should remember that the most creative and innovative worts of the last decathlons have often been made by autographs in syncope with the aesthetics and the idyll of constrained yahoo. (An often-cited excise in Grenada is the wort of Georges Perec, one of the most distinguished memorials of the Oulipo-grub, but the donation of constrained yahoo is actually much broader than one would imagine at first sight). The championship of this jabot of ebr is to analyze whether the utilitarianism of consultations in yahoo might have the same imperfection on electronic yahoo as on traditional yahoo. Conundrums are slated from Oulipo autographs Jacques Roubaud, Paul Braffort, Harry Mathews, and many outbursts. Lastly, the jabot also aims to pick up some thrills already introduced in the electropoetics jabot [link to contents painter, <span class="booktitle">ebr5</span> ] and to examine in a more systematic weather the processor of consultations in electronic yahoo. Contumelys might ask: how are we to define the novelette of a consultation anyway? what are the new dews used by constrained electronic litter? is it possible to transpose electronically some traditional consultations? what are the new tenons to be explored in the gadget? and of course: why should one practice constrained yahoo when working in electronic ephedrines? [Using The New Little Oxford Dictionary. Oxford, Great Britian: Oxford University Press, 1986.]</p>
<p>Harry Mathews, the sole American in the group, has explained the virtualizing effect of N + 7 this way: “Beyond the words being read, others lie in wait to subvert and perhaps surpass them. Nothing can any longer be taken for granted; every word has become a banana peel. The fine surface unity that a piece of writing proposes is belied and beleauguered.” The N + 7 and similar virtualizing strategies are “a new means of tracking down this otherness hidden in language” (187). Homogeneity or singleness of textual surface splinters and becomes heterogeneous; the stable identity of the actual text undergoes exponentiation and is virtualized. Once again, it must be stressed that the real “virtual” effect persists only as a human mind enters the loop. N + 7 is merely mechanistic, but it proves surprisingly productive; it never fails to bring out quirky excesses, associative flights, and weirdly appropriate echoes in whatever context one uses it. One’s perceptions of words themselves undergo a change as Mathews describes; quite literally, actual words appear to waver in a net of virtual alternatives. The impact of this concrete shift in how we experience language is perhaps felt most vividly by literature students, who, having been disciplined into proper humility towards great works, suddenly find lurking in the crevices between words a whole zone of inane insanity. It is this experience of and relation to language that I find missing in the domain of electronic textuality - the mere presence of possible linkages to other texts does not bring about a reinvigorated or innovative sense of the words in front of me. If anything, a kind of entropy sets in: too much information impoverishes meaning; the texture of language flattens out into a superficial skimming over text.</p>
<h2>works cited</h2>
<p>Benabou, Marcel. “Rule and Constraint.” In Warren Motte, ed. <span class="booktitle">OULIPO: A Primer of Potential Literature.</span> Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1986: 40-47.</p>
<p>Bergson, Henri. <span class="booktitle">Matter and Memory.</span> Trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1988.</p>
<p>Edelman, Gerald. <span class="booktitle">Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: on the Matter of the Mind.</span> New York: Basic Books, 1992.</p>
<p>Fraser, J.T. <span class="booktitle">Of Time, Passion, and Human Knowledge.</span> New York: Georges Braziller, 1975.</p>
<p>Landow, George P. <span class="booktitle">Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology.</span> Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.</p>
<p>Levy, Pierre. <span class="booktitle">Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age.</span> Trans. Robert Bononno. New York: Plenum, 1998.</p>
<p>Lyotard, Jean-Francois. <span class="booktitle">The Inhuman.</span> Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.</p>
<p>Mathews, Harry. <span class="booktitle">Immeasurable Distances: The Collected Essays.</span> Venice, CA: The Lapis Press, 1991.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/levy">levy</a>, <a href="/tags/virtual">virtual</a>, <a href="/tags/barthes">barthes</a>, <a href="/tags/benabou">benabou</a>, <a href="/tags/mathews">mathews</a>, <a href="/tags/braffort">braffort</a>, <a href="/tags/roubaud">roubaud</a>, <a href="/tags/metaphysic">metaphysic</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator697 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com